Morgan's Run
by LadyElaine
Summary: People look at me and say, 'So what's your mutation?' I tell them I have great digestion.
1. Porcupines and Elephants and Whatifs, Oh...

Title: Morgan's Run

Author: LadyElaine

Rating: R

Disclaimer: The X-Men comics belong to Marvel and Stan Lee. X-Men: The Movie belongs to 20th Century Fox. I'm just playing in the sandbox. Oh, and Mulder and Scully belong to Fox and Chris Carter. (Keep your pantyhose on, I only mention the dynamic duo briefly.)

Archive: Ask first, I doubt I'll say no.

Feedback: Comments are appreciated. Constructive criticism is adored.

Summary: Remember that UN summit at Ellis Island? When Magneto's machine was destroyed, the shockwave carried the radiation right up to the edge of the island...

Morgan's Run

I. Porcupines and Elephants and What-ifs, Oh My!

People ask me what my mutation is, as if this is casual conversational fare--standing there, looking me straight in my slit-pupil eyes; me with me my thick black fur, cat's legs, prehensile tail, and webbed dorsal quills. They look at me and say, "So, what's your mutation?" 

I tell them I have great digestion.

I do, too. I can eat damn near anything organic. Can't taste much of it, though--food dissolves too quickly in my mouth. It has to do with my killer T-cells, my dad once told me. I didn't understand what he said then, and I'm still not quite sure about it. All I know is that pretty much all of my bodily fluids--blood, saliva, sweat, you name it--are rather corrosive when it comes to living things. Or dead ones, for that matter. Tell you one thing, though: I don't have to worry about fleas. It's kind of neat to watch them--and mosquitoes, too--melt from the inside out. Cool, in a gross sort of way.

I used to be normal. Okay, okay, I used to think I was normal. I was fourteen when it happened.

My dad was a geneticist. Bet you saw that one coming, didn't you? He used to be just a regular internist--you know, your run-of-the-mill family doctor--until I came along. Then he began to study gene therapy. If I ever thought to ask him why, I can't remember what he answered. If he answered. He was always pretty aloof. You know, way out there, living in his head, writing papers in his sleep, stuff like that.

Mom was a professor of sociology at the city college. What city, you ask? Sorry, but you'll just have to wonder. I'm not giving out that information. Like it really matters. The feds think I was the one that "disappeared" my family. Sure. Of course, I know it was them all along. Damn it, where's Mulder and Scully when you really need 'em?

Anyway, back to Mom. She could have had tenure at damn near any school she wanted, but that's Mom for you. Wanted to teach as many minds as she could reach, and there are plenty that can't afford the rich-bitch colleges. She wrote, too. Got two books published. The first one was _Lilith's Legacy: The Outcaste from Prehistory to the Present Day_. I suppose you can pretty much tell from that mouthful what it's about. The other one was _The Mutation of Society_. That one's not hard to get, either. Three guesses as to which side of the mutant debate she was on. So, two books, plus a double handful of articles published in scientific and popular magazines. She was starting to make a dent in societal thinking. Maybe.

Is it my fault their careers--maybe their lives, too--got cut short? I don't know. I used to ask myself that every day. Not every teenage girl has that question on her mind.

I'm guessing right now I ought to go ahead and tell you my name. I mean, jeez, eight paragraphs here, and I still haven't mentioned my goddamn name. Okay, so it's Melody Morgan. Like I said, I'm a runaway and a mutant. Boy, am I ever a mutant. I'm not one of those lucky bastards who can go have a nice house, get a good job, live a fucking normal life with no one the wiser. I gotta live in the sewers and the woods, for chrissake. At least Dad gave me some good lessons in wilderness survival. More on that later.

So if you ever have the good fortune to run into little old me, this is what you can expect: I'm about five-foot-four, with yellow eyes, and I have black fur all over my body. And I do mean ALL over my body, which is a good thing, too, because I haven't really found anything to wear since this all happened. My legs are kind of like a cat's--you know, bent at the knees and ankles, and I walk on my toes. (Man, was it ever hard to learn to walk again afterwards!) I have a long tail, which is prehensile. Comes in handy in a pinch. I think I mentioned a set of webbed dorsal quills. I have six of them in a column down my back, and they're the main reason clothes don't fit anymore. They look kind of like porcupine's quills, except they're longer, thicker, and hollow. And webbed. I think the skin between them is about the only skin I've got that's not furred over. I guess it's supposed to be a natural air conditioner; that's what I use it as, anyway. Try living inside a pelt like mine; you'd get pretty hot, too. I raise my spines, skin open to the breeze, and voila--instant AC unit. Elephants do it with their ears--the African ones, anyway. Asian ones don't have to worry about the heat so much; that's why their ears are smaller.

Okay, can we say rambling? 

If you were to touch me--and I don't recommend it, you'd wind up with a rash--you'd notice little coin-sized bumps under my skin. Those are actually bone disks growing in a layer of cartilage. Most people--human and mutant both--have a layer of fat underneath their skin. Yeah, even those supermodel babes. They've got it, too. Lucky me, I get natural Kevlar instead. I bet you're pretty jealous of me now, right? I can eat anything I want, and I don't have much fatty tissue to worry about. Go ahead and be jealous, then. I can starve to death in two days flat. Life's a bitch. Why don't you try being on the run, having to survive on bark?

The really killer thing--literally--is my claws. Come on now, you didn't think a cat-woman-thing like me wouldn't have claws, did you? Claws on my fingers, claws on my toes. It's the ones on my fingers you've got to worry about. Scratch that (har, har). _I've_ got to worry about them. They're venomous. My dorsal spines, too. My claws are pretty much under control now. These days, I can scratch something without the venom glands in the tips of my fingers going off. My quills, though, have six little minds of their own.

I wake up sometimes to find the leaves--or rags, or newspapers, or whatever the hell I'm using as bedding that night--eaten through as if from acid. Talk about a wet dream.

So anyway, there I was, a fourteen-year-old kid, with two genius parents. Did you hear about that UN summit at Ellis Island a few years ago? You know, the one where that Magneto guy set off some sort of machine? They still run the footage of it every now and then; if you catch it again, watch carefully: When the radiation bubble burst, the shockwave from it carried a little bit of that radiation right up to the very edge of the island.

Yeah, I know you know what's coming, but I've got to tell it anyway. Mom and Dad had both made names for themselves in their respective fields, and they'd been invited to speak about the mutant issue at the conference. And as we lived in Tennessee at the time, it was quite a trip. They wouldn't let me stay home for the week, so I got to come along. They were good parents, but I resented the hell out of them. I still do, a little bit. Maybe if Dad hadn't been so worried about leaving me home alone...

Screw it. I don't want to think about what-ifs any more.


	2. We're Going to Ride on a Fairy

****

II. "We're Going to Ride on a Fairy"

The flight to New York was one of the more boring experiences of my life. Being your typical teenager, I had refused my parents' advice to bring a book or two, just for the sake of refusing them. Crazy, huh? So I sat and sulked--teenage girls are the consummate experts on sulking--and pretended I wasn't sick of my own attitude. That's right, I was depressed about being depressed. Somebody should have done the world a favor and just shot me then and there.

After the plane was the hotel (don't let me get started on that!) and after the hotel was the ferry to the island. The first time I took a ferry, I think I was three or four. My dad said what sounded like, "We're going to take a ride on a fairy." You can imagine my disappointment when it was a boat.

Did I tell you my parents were great? Even back then, I thought so, though God himself would never catch me telling. They were dressed up all nice, but they let me wear jeans and a sweater. Granted, it was a nice sweater, but still. Then they told me I could sit pretty much anywhere I wanted--well, not in with the foreign government people or anything, but anywhere in the regular folks section. I asked (cajoled was more like it) to sit off at the edge of the island, where I could watch the water. 

"As long as security doesn't stop you, go ahead," Dad said.

I used to have this great hair. I mean, thick, down to the middle of my back, and red as all hell. Wouldn't you know, I hated it. It gave me freckles, which I thought made me look like Pippi Longstocking or something. It attracted guys like flies to honey, though. Never failed. So when I went walking around at the periphery before everything started, this boy named Aaron hooked up with me. I can't remember his last name, or even if he told it to me. He was a great kid. I almost got my first kiss that night. Probably would have, too, if he hadn't had to go back when the fireworks started going off. The last time I saw him, right before I went temporarily blind, he was looking through a set of pay binoculars. 

An Indian man was the keynote speaker. His name started with "Chandrilagupta" and went on for a few miles after that. Even sitting on the wall at the water's edge, I could hear his speech, though it wasn't terribly interesting. I was amusing myself by imagining what might be swimming just below the surface of the dark water, with my skinny teenager legs swinging just above it. Cue the Jaws theme, Johnny. The Statue of Liberty was incredibly beautiful, too (when I bothered to look at her) especially with those fireworks behind her. Of course, I was fourteen. I was much too mature to be awed by that.

If you never got the whole story about what happened that night, don't look at me. I don't really know that much about it, either. All I remember was seeing this bright light coming out of Lady Liberty's torch and thinking that it was some sort of special effect for the summit. Going off a bit early, I thought. But the light kept getting brighter and bigger. It started spilling out all over the harbor--and silly me, I thought it was pretty. I could hear people starting to yell, but I sat and looked at the light. Let the adults worry about this shit, I'd just enjoy it.

Well, you've probably seen the footage of the explosion at least once. Like I said, that radiation shit didn't make it all the way to the main body of Ellis Island, but the explosion blasted some of it right to the edge. Right where a stupid fourteen-year-old girl was sitting, avoiding her parents just because she liked the thought of them being worried about her. Standing, actually. I had jumped to my feet when the torch exploded. 

Like that could have given me a better view.

The shock wave knocked me right back down. I remember an incredible headache, and not being able to see all of a sudden, and that's about it. Oh, yeah, and I wanted my parents, bad. 

They found me eventually. As they told it, they thought I was dead at first, because I looked like I'd been burned black. But no, that was just my body's first reaction to the radiation, my skin going to town and having itself a ball. That and the blindness. I couldn't see for the next four, five days. When I got my sight back, I'd lost the color red.

I lost more than that when I looked in the mirror.

I still don't know how the hell Mom and Dad got me out of there quietly, what with all the people running around panicking. I don't even remember how we got home, but we did. Dad said something about a friend of a friend, but he never did explain that. I think I slept for about a day and a half after we got back. When I woke up, I still hurt. God, I hurt. It wasn't just a headache, either. My eyes hurt, my back hurt, my legs felt like they were broken.

You know how you can recall stuff--the little, unimportant things that happen when the big shit is going on? That's the sort of thing I remember: How my skin felt like a thousand ant stings all at once; the way the blood tasted when my eyeteeth came loose; the tinny sound of my scream when all my fingernails and toenails and hair fell out at the same time.

For all my earlier life, Mom had been the one to take care of me when I was sick. She brought me hot tea when I had colds, wiped my forehead when I had fevers, held me whenever I had to puke. When I had chicken pox, when all the blisters down my throat burst in the middle of the night, Mom held me down and made me gargle peach Riuniti. But she couldn't handle this. It was my dad--the man I'd always had to guess on for Christmas presents--who stayed with me.

When I got my sight back, one of the first things I saw was that Dad's skin looked like it had been rubbed raw. I know now that my heavy-duty immune system had just started to kick in, and my sweat was like a mild acid. But all I knew then was that Dad, with his arms red and swollen, still picked me up like a baby and carried me to the bathroom. 

Shit.

I looked in the mirror and said, "I guess I don't have to worry about freckles any more."


	3. Unbiased

****

III. Unbiased

It took three weeks for my tail to grow in all the way. I still don't know how long it is--Dad and I stopped counting at sixteen vertebrae, and I never bothered to count again. Somehow, he made every change something exciting, instead of something gross or scary. He called me 'Snowball'. Me, with my midnight fur. That's his sense of humor for you. I think it was kind of a challenge, too, since he knew I was going through hell. But I could see in the dark, so he would send me down to the basement for his tools when he needed them. He rubbed my sore fingertips when my claws erupted and told me not to use the couch to sharpen them. And when my venom turned on, he went wild with--I don't know. He was a scientist. All sorts of weird things used to excite him.

Mom called me beautiful and told me she was proud of me. The stuff parents are supposed to say, I know, but she meant it. She was an artist, did I mention that yet? She never actually showed me her sketchbook, but I used to sneak peeks after she'd gone to bed. It was filled with drawings of me. From her perspective, I guess I really was beautiful. I tell you what, seeing yourself from your own mother's point of view is... well, I don't know if embarrassing is the right word. I started feeling kind of uncomfortable around her.

I'm not sure I really want to talk about this part, but here goes.

I woke up in the middle of the night--and why the hell does the truly bad stuff always wait till the middle of the night?--feeling like my insides were burning. I tried to get out of bed, but my legs, which I was still kind of unsteady on, wouldn't support me. Mom heard the crash and came to see what was the matter. I was crying with the pain, so she held me carefully and yelled my dad out of bed. Then she saw all the blood on my mattress, and she really started yelling.

I hadn't been back to school in--jeez, months, I guess; not since Ellis Island, anyway. I didn't complain, of course. I suppose I must have missed my friends, but.... Hell, what would they say if they could see me now? Mom and Dad had pulled me out of the school's roster and informed the state that they'd be home schooling me from now on. Of course, they kind of neglected to mention that 'home schooling' included how to groom myself, how to talk around my fangs without sounding like my mouth was full of marbles, and how to sit on my new tail without hurting myself. I know, it sounds silly, but trust me--the damn thing's sensitive. No wonder cats don't like you pulling theirs. And of course, there was always Dad going on about how fascinating all these mutations were. Yeah, right. Not from my point of view.

Don't get me wrong, now, they still made me study math and history and Latin and all that shit. Seriously, though. What the hell am I supposed to use it for? Estimate the number of leaves on a tree? Translate its Latin name? Sure.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, in the bedroom, with my mom screaming bloody murder. Emphasis on the bloody.

Shit, shit, shit. I don't know if I can talk about this, even now. It's not just the memory of the pain, you know? It's all the crap that going to the hospital caused. No, I guess you don't know--but shit, you can probably guess what the ER nurses thought when my Dad carried me in. Remember what I look like, now. Black fur, long tail, dorsal spines. 

You know how long emergency room waits normally are? Hours, it seems. I remember going in for an ear infection when I was little--fat chance of that happening now, of course--and it took fucking forever for anyone to see me. Now, though, I was a mutant--no. I was a mutie. A monster. A goddamn animal. Some smartass told my dad to take me to a vet--this was a human hospital. That really got me crying then, more than the pain in my stomach. Goddammit, why the hell do people have to be like that?

I was still bleeding down below, but the chair was vinyl, or something. Mom had grabbed a big sheet to wrap me in, but it was cotton. There were big holes in it now where my blood had eaten through it.

Before you ask, no, this was not me getting my period. I was fifteen by then, and I'd been having it regularly for long enough to know the difference, though I hadn't had one since the change.

After a while, Dad was pacing and cursing. People who'd come in long after us were getting seen already, but that shouldn't surprise you, right? Well, it surprised Mom and Dad, and they were pissed. I don't know about parenthood--I never will, either--but I saw them scared that night. Really scared. I think they thought--well, I don't know what they thought, but I was afraid I was dying.

I remember everything going gray, and feeling horribly cold, and wanting to go to sleep. That's when the nurses and doctors finally got off their asses and did something. Mom was going nuts, and Dad wasn't helping, either--the internist in him kept trying to give the real doctors advice. If I hadn't been so out of it, I'd have been really embarrassed.

Fuck this. I can't talk about this shit anymore. I'll cry on my new notebook, and God knows where I'd get another one in such good condition. Let me just say that by the time I got out of there, my uterus, one ovary, one kidney, and about a third of my liver had melted away before my body's defense against itself finally kicked in. It was my own immune system that had done it--my T-cells attacking what they thought was alien tissue, because the cells of that tissue weren't sending out the right chemical white flags.

If mutation is supposed to be the next step in evolution, then Mother Nature's still got a few kinks to work out. _Homo sapiens superior_, my furry ass.

Mom and Dad's faces were pasted all over the TV and newspapers for the next few weeks. Mom lost her job at the university. No one would even look at Dad's research anymore. Science is supposed to be unbiased, you know. Only people without mutant families can be fair about mutation. I'm not even going to go into how hard it was for them to sell the house. I told them I'd stay in the basement whenever it got shown, and they made sure I locked it, so no one could come in and gawk at the neighborhood mutie.

Shortly before someone finally took it--at less than half what it was worth--Dad's old college roommate came to visit him. "Doctor Dave," I always used to call him when I was little. He wouldn't look at me at dinner. Mom and I both went to bed early to give them a chance to catch up, since they hadn't seen each other in a few years. 

My bedroom was close enough to the living room that, even with the door closed, I could still hear their conversation.

"How long had you known, Ian?" That was Doctor Dave, so quiet and calm that I knew he must have been angry.

"Mary Elizabeth's amniocentesis. The OB-GYN asked her if she wanted an abortion."

Dave said, "So why didn't she have one?"

"Jesus, Dave! You know how long it took us to get pregnant! Did I ever tell you how many miscarriages Mary Elizabeth had?" Dad sighed, and I heard the ice in his brandy clink. "You don't turn down a gift like that. No matter what." There was a long silence, then Dad spoke again. "Almost everything Melody's got should have been latent. It was that radiation at the UN summit that triggered it."

"Have you spoken to Erik?"

"He's been... out of the country." Dad coughed--you know, the kind of cough that men make when they're trying not to cry. "You're a doctor, David. What do you think?"

"Yes, I am a doctor. And all I see is how many people that... girl... has the potential to kill."


	4. That Shade of Gray

****

IV. That Shade of Gray

We moved out to the family farm after that. Dad's grandparents had been Quakers and farmers in the old tradition--until the economy had made that old tradition impossible. They'd managed to hang onto the farmhouse and four or five acres, but the rest had gone to the government. Which had promptly done absolutely nothing with it. We didn't mind. We now had acres and acres of privacy.

That was the best year of my life, I think.

Hired contractors had kept the house in fairly good repair, but it was swarming with spiders and those little green garden lizards when we moved in. Mom okayed the lizards, but said the spiders had to go. Since their bites couldn't hurt me, that was my job. I got over my fear of spiders real quick.

We got a flock of chickens, a goat, two cats, a German shepherd, and a couple rabbits that soon turned into a couple dozen rabbits. The goat was for Mom--she'd always adored the creatures for some unfathomable reason. The cats kept the mice away, and the dog--Ramses, we'd named him--kept the neighbors away. The rabbits were for the stewpot. Everything else was for... well, because that's what you had when you lived on a farm. We had fresh eggs more mornings than we didn't, but we still had to go to the store for milk. 

Actually, Mom and Dad had to go to the store for milk. I never set foot off our property, unless it was into the old woods.

I guess the only thing really bad was that the animals hated me. I mean, seriously, in the way that only animals do. The cats used to piss on my pillow when I wasn't there, and the dog barked his head off every time he saw me. They never touched me, though. They knew. The webbing on my quills has some psychedelic black and yellow pattern. Birds might be able to get away with color for the sake of beauty, but animals like skunks and frogs and hornets--and me--well, we show our colors as a warning sign. It was a bitch, really, because I'd always loved animals. There's nothing like the feel of a cat arching under your hand, or a dog's wet tongue on your chin. "Dog slobber cures anything," I used to joke.

Anyway, Dad had lost his standing in the scientific community, and Mom had lost her job as a professor, but we made do. Dad threw himself into being a farmer, saying that the earth was in his blood. Well, maybe on his hands and face and all over his clothes, but.... 

Mom started writing romance novels. I kid you not! She wrote under the pen name "Harmony Braxton," and was almost immediately successful. The "Harmony" was after my name, Melody (and I'd been named after Dad's mom). I don't know what the "Braxton" was from. It's funny, in all her books, either the hero or the heroine is a mutant--though she never comes right out and says it. They've always got something special about them, like "Rock Adams," who had super strength (and the pecs to match, if the cover's anything to go by), or "Angel McGuire," who could fly. She never said so, but I think Mom was still trying to do her part for mutant rights.

Dad and I teased Mom about where she'd gotten her steamy ideas, as much as Mom and I teased Dad about not being able to raise so much as a turnip (who the hell actually grows turnips, anyhow?) and for a while all was right in my world.

A peaceful, happy family life wasn't the only thing that was great, of course, but it was a pretty big thing. I think part of it was that I was getting to know my father for the first time. Like I said before, he had always been kind of... apart. I know it sounds awful, but I think when my mutation hit, I suddenly became interesting to him. 

Yeah. That sounds awful. But I didn't care. After all, my family could have kicked me out on the street, like some of the others I've met.

The other thing that was great was that Dad got it into his head to drive thirty miles to the nearest bookstore and buy a great, heaping stack of stuff on survival in the wild. 

Then we started going camping.

We all went together on our first camping trip; but after that, Mom always declined, saying she'd rather stay where there was a real bathroom, rather than a bush. I didn't have as much of a problem with it as her. I'm not going to go into a full description of that end of my digestion, but--well, let's just say that not too many solids make it through.

Good grief. I can't believe I just wrote that. Color me embarrassed.

Anyway. Dad and I lived outdoors three days out of every week--which was actually pretty nice, because Mom had started getting kind of stuffy since we'd moved. He drove me really hard to be the best I could at forestry. I don't know, maybe he felt some sort of guilt about what had happened to me. After about a year, he decided that I was ready to rough it on my own. Really on my own. As in, he dropped me off in the middle of the woods, and drove off in the SUV. (Yes, we had an SUV. So does everyone else, but everyone else doesn't use theirs for safaris.)

I had the goddamnest holy shitting best time of my life. Maybe it was because I was actually using my mutation instead of living in fear of it, but it was like I was finally in my element. Okay, so when's the last time you wanted to shout to the world, "All right! I'm a predator! Woo-hoo!"

Should I say something melodramatic here, like, "I was walking on air right up until I got home"? Or how about, "My elation evaporated when I saw the blood at the door"? Yeah, that's it. 

My elation evaporated when I saw the blood at the door.

The goat had been scared off, but the rabbits and chickens were as oblivious as only rabbits and chickens can be. The dog was gone. So were the cats. 

I still don't know exactly what happened to them, where they went. Not the cats, I mean my parents. Inside, the house was quieter than it had been since we'd moved in. No keys typing, nothing bubbling in the kitchen, no Dad humming some off-key tune. Everything was ransacked, of course. Whoever had been in there had seen enough suspense flicks to know that you always leave your victim's house a mess. Who the hell were they trying to fool, anyway? They weren't after any jewels, or money, or deep, dark secrets. The only thing I could figure then is that someone had seen me and told someone else, who then told someone else, and then they all decided to go on a witch hunt. Make that a mutant hunt.

There wasn't enough blood for me to think someone had been killed, but... still. Whose was it? Let me make this clear: my only "superior" sense is my eyesight, and that's just a matter of opinion. I can see in the dark, but I can't see red. The only reason I knew the drops and smears at the door were blood was that I've learned what shade of gray red is.

I forgot I was a mutant then. I was a scared girl, and I called the cops. They're still after me. Of course, they'll have to get in line these days.

****


	5. Everything Went Dark

****

V. Everything Went Dark

Did you ever read that book, _My Side of the Mountain_? I swear, the author must have been an Eagle Scout. That, or an Army Ranger. Even when he's complaining about how hard life in the woods is, he's making it look easy. I grew up on that book. It gave me many happy years' worth of fantasies of living in a national park. 

Me: Hi, I'm Melody, and I'm going to eat you for dinner. Deer: Hi, I'm an unsuspecting idiot, and all you have to do is set up this trap that's so complicated, I can't even describe it properly. Me: No problem. Munch, munch.

Why the hell did I head north? This was, after all, the beginning of winter, and if I'd had any sense in my furry head, I'd have headed south. I don't know. I had just started running. When I'd realized which direction I was going--well, by then I was too scared to turn back. I mean, my inner idiot comes out to play at the very worst times. A mutant calling the cops about her family's disappearance? All they saw were the teeth and claws.

Now, let me say something about snow. It's cold.

The snow would get into my fur--which, thank you, Mother Nature, was NOT made for keeping moisture out. It would creep underneath and melt, and then the cold water would crawl all over my skin and drive me nuts with itching. Cold itching. I swear, I will defend any cat or dog from ever having to be bathed again. If they'll let me.

Let me say something else about snow. It's fucking cold!

I had the extreme bad timing of going on the run right at the beginning of winter. Sure, I had just spent a week in the woods, but a week just doesn't cut it for how bad it can really get. Put a dunce cap on me, I thought I could go indefinitely. That's because, as a city girl from Tennessee, I had no idea what winters are really like in New England. I know I said I could starve to death in two days flat. This was when I learned just how short my fat stores actually are. I've got breasts and a butt, and that's about it.

Well, yes, you say, but you're a natural predator, right? Sure. Just, there wasn't that much natural prey around to be had. And my fur is black, remember? Black fur, white snow. You figure it out.

I ate bark. I'm not kidding. Not the dry, hard stuff on the outside, but the softer--well, relatively--stuff underneath. I had to chew it more than I was used to, because it didn't dissolve that quickly, even with my super saliva. I tried pine needles, too. They chewed easier, but they tasted awful. I found some acorns beneath the snow under an oak tree. I ate them, shells and all. That was the closest I came, for a while, to a full meal. 

Back then, I never stayed in any one place long enough to find any sort of home. No miraculous, just-when-I-need-it cave. No enormous tree with a hollow trunk just waiting for me to move in, Mr. Catskills. No kind old mountain men willing to take in a half-frozen, starving waif. Furry waif. With spines and a tail. 

Eventually, I found a highway. Roads make good food sources, if you're patient--but not just any roads. The highways, the freeways, the interstates. Cars whiz by without watching out for the abandoned animals that use them the same as people. Squish.

I had to keep inside the treeline and only scavenge at night, when there were fewer cars. But at least I was getting protein every few days. I didn't care how dead it was, how much it smelled, or whether I could have played Frisbee with it. At least it was too cold to rot much.

After a while, though, the highway came to a city. That is, after all, what highways are for. I knew I would be safer outside the limits, in the woods with the rest of the animals. Despite what conservationists may say, there's a lot more forests left than you might think. I spent most of the rest of the winter circling the outskirts of the outskirts, beyond the occasional farms, out where the trees made enough shelter for me. 

I did catch one deer, I have to say. Don't applaud me just yet. I wasn't sure whether it was hunting season, but that didn't much matter to me. Understand, this was pure luck. I happened to be taking a piss at the time, in fact. The deer must have been running from something else, otherwise it would have avoided my smell--not to mention that black fur, white snow thing. I was lucky enough to hear it coming, and I managed to tag it.

Yes, tag it. All I needed was a good scratch, and my venom (remember that?) would take care of the rest. So yes, I got to play predator once, at least. I'll leave out the gory details of what it's like to eat raw meat.

Of course, I wasn't the only hunter--or scavenger--around. I'd barely had the chance to dig in when company came. You know, I had no idea coyotes lived in those parts. I'd thought they were southwestern animals, but I guess they had done what the raccoon had and followed human development. 

It was a pair of them. They watched from a ways away, barely visible between the trees. I stared at them and realized that my spines were standing straight up. So was the longer crest of fur on my head. Was this instinct? I don't know, but when their eyes dropped, so did my hackles, and I went back to my meal. 

"You can have the rest when I'm done," I said. At the sound of my voice, the coyotes startled and ran away a short distance. I guess they weren't expecting a human voice to come out of me. So I shut up, and they came back.

It was rather nice to have company after such a long time alone, even if it wasn't human. I ate, they watched me. When I decided I'd had enough and literally couldn't eat another bite, I backed off. The bigger coyote edged toward the carcass. When I made no move to stop him--in fact, I laid down and started grooming the blood out of my fur--he took a cautious bite. 

That's when I learned how potent my venom is. It killed the deer quickly enough, but... I won't tell you how long it took that coyote to die. I chased his mate off and finally put the poor thing out of his misery. The deer I tried to bury, but I could only cover it with snow. If I could have burned it, I would have. It still bothers me, how many other animals must have tried to scavenge off that meat and met the same end as the coyote.

Since then, I've stuck to smaller prey, like rats and squirrels, when I've managed to catch them. No leftovers. 

A few days later, I found out that it was hunting season, after all.

The neat thing about humans is that they're bipedal. Upright. You can tell the species from a long way off. The neat thing about me is that my legs fold right up underneath me, and I can go quadrupedal without too much trouble--only a sore neck after a while. The neat thing about hunting rifles is that you can shoot something from far off without knowing what it is--except that, since it's not two-legged, it can't be human. Right?

I wish I could say that some kind soul found me, took me in, and nursed me back to health. But that's not how this story goes. All I know is, I'm neither human nor animal, but something in between. 

Black fur, white snow, and red blood. Ooh, pretty picture. Okay, okay, I'll say it. Everything Went Dark. There, happy? Now that I've got the cliche out of the way, let me state for the record that I didn't die.

No shit.


	6. A Nice White Girl

****

VI. A Nice White Girl

Ever get the feeling that somewhere, someone is laughing at you? Yeah? Well, not me. I feel like somewhere, someone in a white lab coat and spectacles is taking copious notes about me.

You know what would have been great, back when my immune system was attacking my body? One of those healing factor things. But I guess it couldn't have kicked in back then, or else half my mutations would never have taken hold. What would have happened when my fingertips split to let out my claws? Or when my eyeteeth fell out to make way for my new fangs? Or when the bones in my legs softened enough to reshape themselves?

What would my life have been like if Mom and Dad hadn't had to rush me to the emergency room? Would their faces still have made the evening news? Would they still have their careers and their respectability? What if we'd never had to move out to the farm? Would they still... Forget it. I've asked that question too many times already.

Instead, I've got a series of radical mutations, and because of one of them, there'll never be a chance for me to pass on my genes.

What am I, an experiment?

I had appendicitis when I was younger (now _that's_ irony for you!) so I've been under general anesthesia before. I can tell you, it's weird to see the hospital room fading to black, only to wake up a moment later with everything done. That's kind of what happened here, only weirder. The last thing I remember is falling to the snow. I have no idea how I managed to stuff myself into the snow-covered bush where I woke up. I was curled tightly around myself, my tail wrapped over my nose, with my back facing the outside. My quills were erect--just waiting, I suppose, for any animal too curious (or hungry) to leave me alone.

Don't ask me how this healing thing works. All I know is, when I get badly hurt, I fall deeply asleep. I don't know, maybe I hibernate, or something. Maybe it's because I have such short reserves of energy that everything else gets shut down. The bullet must have passed clean through me--despite my layer of bony cartilage--because I now have two patches of bare, black skin peeking out from the opposite flanks.

That's right, the skin beneath my pelt is black. And me, a nice white girl.

I was starving when I woke up. You may say how you're "starving" when you're really hungry, and your stomach is growling. I actually was starving. My breasts had shrunk. When I crawled out of the bush--freezing, by the way--I couldn't even stand up. I ate everything I could find. Twigs I broke off that bush; bark from nearby trees; grass peeking out from the snow that was finally beginning to melt. I found an old, dry carcass of... something or other, I didn't care. I ate the bones.

Don't ask me how long I'd been out. All I know is, it took me almost three days to regain my strength.

I went into the city late one evening. I crossed bare farm fields under the new moon, always staying on all fours, low to the ground. I kept as far away as I could from roads, though there were few enough cars way out there. I finally came to a loose collection of small mobile homes. When I say loose, I mean that you couldn't really tell where one person's property became another's. The lawns--if you can call them lawns--were unkempt under the remains of the snow, with enough small trees and scrub for me to creep through, since it was still night. There were no streetlights way out there, so I was safe enough until dawn.

And there were trash cans.

People are ridiculously wasteful, and there is no greater treasure than a full trash can. I found chicken bones, wilted lettuce, scraps of sandwiches, even part of a rancid ham. I feasted that night. There was so much real food that I didn't even have to eat the paper. 

The only problem with metal trash cans is the noise they make. I tried to be quiet, but when you haven't had a real meal for longer than you care to remember, caution is secondary. The man that came out the door to investigate the ruckus was an old Indian, with long, steel gray hair bound in a single braid and eyes narrowed by heavy wrinkles. His flashlight swiveled towards me.

This is where Melody does the melt-into-the-darkness thing, right? Wrong. This is where Melody does the deer-in-the-headlights thing.

When he saw me, his eyes widened, and he grunted. Then, "You might as well come in," he said. "No sense in raiding my garbage, when there's better food inside."

It actually took a few moments for that to sink in. A combination of disbelief and not having heard another human voice in ages, I suppose. I stood up slowly, letting the old man get a good look at me, and told my spines firmly to lie down. They didn't listen.

"Well?" the old man said.

I nodded and walked slowly to the door, still unsure of his welcome. But he gave me a warm smile and motioned me in. The look of the place made me expect a fireplace to go with all the rugs, hangings, and wooden carvings, but it was a mobile home with no room for a chimney. A small, spotted pelt hung beside a pair of antlers. Dried gourds were suspended from the corners of the ceiling. 

He made me sandwiches and hot tea, and my quills finally relaxed, so I could lean back in the soft leather recliner. I told Maurice--that was his name--who I was, where I was from, and why I'd had to run away. He nodded and refilled my tea and told me about the last winter, when his neighbor's little girl had been killed by a bear. It was like an exchange, pain for pain, and my last barriers fell.

Finally warm both inside and out, I fell asleep in the old leather chair. My last coherent thought was that I hadn't known there were any bears in this part of the country.


	7. A Snowball's Chance in Hell

****

VII. A Snowball's Chance in Hell

I woke with a pounding headache, of course. My legs were curled in front of me, my arms wrapped in front of them, my wrists and ankles bound with a length of old hempen rope. My tail was bent underneath me, sitting at an angle it wasn't meant to, and my long feet dangled from the edge of the chair. I had a gag in my mouth, but I could already feel the cotton cloth beginning to dissolve. Maurice sat on his haunches before me, his hand stroking the fur on my arm. His skin would start to prickle soon, then develop into a rash, then begin to flake off. Even if I wasn't gagged, though, I wouldn't have told him that.

"Hey, Bert." He spoke into an old-fashioned rotary phone. "We got another one. Yeah. See you in a few minutes, then." He stood long enough to put the phone back in its cradle on a side table, then crouched back in front of me. 

My eyes must have begged the question.

"Bert's little girl, her name was Trish. It was a bear-man that done it. Big son of a bitch. Long blond hair and a wolf-skin coat." He sighed, stood up, and left the room. When he came back, he was holding a revolver and a handful of bullets. "I got nothing against mutants, but you ferals, you're too damn dangerous. I'm sorry girl. I'll make it quick."

He started loading the gun. I did the only thing I could--I wet myself.

My super digestive enzymes are connected to my killer immune system, which is connected to my quick (if late on the scene) healing factor, which in turn is connected by starvation to my digestive system. It all comes out in the end. Literally. 

Dignity? What's that? When you've been living on the edge for too damn long, you'll do pretty much anything. But Maurice, well, that old Indian had a home and a leather chair and a floor to keep clean. He put the gun down and went to find a towel. By the time he'd gotten back, the piss had eaten through the rope--along with a good portion of the seat. And me? I was trying to unlock the door.

Cue the neighbor.

Bert was tall and lanky, with a mop and a half of red hair and a beard. He opened the door practically on top of me. I suppose he must have done this before, because he grabbed me without a second thought, spun me around, and jerked me back against him to hold me still while Maurice finished loading his revolver. What, did the old man actually think it would take more than one bullet?

My spines had been erect. The second and third, the two longest ones, embedded themselves in Bert's chest and stomach. The venom glands went off. When he fell, the third quill broke off painfully at the end. Maurice yelled and fired, but the shot missed by a couple inches. He came after me then, when I tried to run. I tripped over Bert's body, and Maurice fell on top of me. One hand kept the gun away from my head long enough for me to bury the claws of the other hand in his throat.

Way back when I could still go to church, I remember a Sunday school teacher saying that the mark Cain wore after he'd killed Abel was guilt. That teacher didn't know what the hell she was talking about. I could have died.

The old man promised it would be quick.

Nothing can compare to taking the life of another human being. I can't describe the power, the responsibility. You can never give it back. You can never make it not have happened.

But it was self defense, you say. Don't I have a will to live? Of course--but I looked straight at another's will to live, and killed anyway. Maurice and Bert were afraid of me, not just because I was a mutant, but because I was, as the old man put it, "feral." But right now, as I see it, the only difference between me and them is that I'm still alive.

I was only too lucky that the sun hadn't yet risen. I don't know how many people the shot woke, but I managed to get out of there without being seen. At least, I don't think I was seen. I hope to hell I wasn't. That spotted pelt on the wall. I don't think it had come from any animal.

I didn't go back to the woods. They were too far away to get to during the day, especially over open fields. Instead, I found myself going down a curbside gutter. These days, I wonder why I didn't just go down the sewers to begin with, especially in the winter. It would have been so much easier. It's always around fifty degrees down there, give or take, and there's generally plenty of food in the way of garbage and rats.

Go ahead and make a face. I don't mind. The thought of eating raw rats makes me pretty sick, too--except when I'm hungry.

Should I mention the roaches? They say that mutants are the next step on the human evolutionary ladder. Well, roaches thought up the idea long before we did. Those bastards can get downright mean sometimes. There's roaches with wings, and roaches without. There's the kind that hiss at you, the kind that bite, the kind that dive-bomb your head when you get too near their nests. There's roaches the size of a fingernail, and roaches the size of your whole hand. They're the one thing that I absolutely refuse to eat, even when I'm wild with hunger.

Besides, they taste awful.

I spent the next few months sewer hopping, now that the cities were becoming packed together. Only when the underground world drained out into a riverbed or a ravine, would I come back out into the world. Then, when I found entry to the next set of sewers I'd crawl back in. Directions were somehow easier down there, despite the lack of sun. North was always forwards.

The sewers have their own unique ecosystems, even without the ever present rats and roaches. Some of those ecosystems now include mutants. It was in one of these sewer systems that I met my first mutant. Other than me, I mean.

Now, let me make one thing clear: I won't make any Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cracks, as long as you don't.

He was green, though.


	8. Short Sighted

****

VIII. Short Sighted

He called me "Mellie," and he made me feel almost normal again.

All right, you can stop what you're thinking right now. There's nothing romantic here.

Quite the opposite, in fact. The people I met later that day were probably the least romantic folks you could imagine. Not surprising, though, since they lived in the sewers, like me, and were afraid of the outside world. Also like me, lately. I've been put off by enough normals now--'flatscans', other mutants call them--that I've got a hard time trusting normal people. It's tough, especially since the two people I cared about most were normal. Are normal. Present tense keeps me sane in that department.

But I've also got a hard time with distrusting people; and meeting other mutants for the first time, I instinctively took their credibility for granted. Hell, if I'm lucky, maybe I'll break myself of that someday.

I was in between sewer systems, and had spent the entire day in a small gorge behind a junkyard. For once, I wasn't hungry--or at least, I could comfortably ignore my stomach--and I had stopped to smell the proverbial roses. Okay, so it was actually rust and dumped tires and dried up oil that I was smelling, but the sun was out, and there were birds singing. Old Man Winter had thrown one last temper tantrum before letting spring come in. 

Ooh, it's a metaphor. Let's try another one. 

On second thought, let's not. Springtime metaphors always lead to unnecessary sap.

Anyway, this was a little gully holding a handful of trees and nearly waist-high scrub and weeds. On one side, it was separated from the junkyard by a tall wooden fence. Another fence, this one only chain-link, led to a low rent neighborhood of small apartments. In between the two fences was a fairly secluded ravine bordered on each end by huge metal sewer pipes. Empty cigarette packages, old soda cans, and other assorted pieces of unrecognizable garbage littered the ground here and there, but it didn't look like it was really frequented by anyone.

Even in a relatively private place like that, though, I'd kept hidden. I had climbed an oak tree, and had just finished snacking on a squirrel's stash of acorns. So much for ignoring my stomach. I was high up enough that I couldn't see the ground (with my prehensile tail, I'm a pretty good climber; told you it comes in handy in a pinch) but not so far up that the branches wouldn't support me. I'd been up there, and fairly still, for long enough that the birds had come back in to land on a few handy branches in my tree. I was deliciously relaxed, my tail dangling from the branch I sat on.

__

Thhpt. Squawk! Slurp. 

I'm serious. That's exactly what I heard. A few minutes later, I heard it again. Slightly peeved at whatever had decided to interrupt my impending nap, I opened my eyes--just in time to get yanked right off my perch. By my TAIL, no less!

General appearances aside, I am not a cat. I don't land on my feet. I came down shrieking and landed with a thump. 

Quit laughing. 

Now that I think about it, I'm lucky I didn't break anything. Like, say, another quill, now that the damaged one had regrown. I'm even luckier that no children decided to investigate the sudden racket.

A tenor voice shouted, "Blimey!" And if that sounds ridiculous to you, just think how I felt, having just been nearly flattened.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" I screeched.

The man who helped me up was only slightly taller than me. "Sorry, miss," he said. "I'm a bit short sighted. Thought the end of your tail was another bird." Once I got around the Cockney accent, he wasn't too hard to understand. Except when he spoke his native language. "Cor, but I cocked that one up, then, didn't I?"

Having never seen another mutant before, I have to confess that I did stare a little. He was dressed in a fairly shapeless mass of drab clothing, and had light green skin, spiky green hair, and a couple of warts. Other than the warts, he wasn't too bad looking. Kind of cute, in a baby bird sort of way.

He stuck out his hand--"I'm Toad"--and not thinking, I took it. Then I realized what I'd done. That was twice now that he'd touched me. The light oil from my fur would be on his hands.

"Umm..." I said. Hey, I never said I was a great conversationalist! "You might want to wipe your hands off."

"Oh, yeah, sure," he said, and did so. Didn't ask why. Didn't give me any odd looks. Just brushed his hands off on his pants. "You hungry?"

I have never, in my life, been able to keep my stomach from understanding that particular word. It's one of those words that just bypasses my conscious mind, going straight for the gut. "I'm always hungry," I blurted. Yep. Tactful, huh? Speaking of tact, it hit me then that I hadn't given him my name. "Oh, sorry," I said. "I'm Melody."

"You sing?"

"Wait a minute," I said at the same time. " 'Toad'??"

"Hey, it's better than Mortimer," he said. His smile showed stumpy little teeth. 

He was close enough to me that I could smell him. His scent was earthy, kind of like mud. I wasn't complaining, though. After all, I smell like charcoal and vinegar. Something to do with my weird body chemistry, I'm sure. He started off toward the entrance to his sewer, obviously expecting me to follow him. I did.

"Yeah, but why 'Toad'?" There went my mouth again. One of these days, I'll learn to think before I speak.

"Well, look at me," he said with a hint of anger. "Besides... I've got a twelve-foot-long tongue."

The way he said that, and the little dance his eyebrows did, and I was suddenly happy that he couldn't see me blush. The strange noise I'd heard, and what he said about "another bird" made sense then. And I thought my table manners were weird.

Then he made me blush again. "So, you always go about starkers?" At my confused look, he said, "Sorry. Naked." Forget all my previous complaints; I am heartily glad for my fur!

"You always ask questions like that?"

"Of lovely naked ladies, sure!" He smiled again, and I finally got it. He wasn't trying to be rude, but breaking the ice the only way he knew how. Smashing it to itty-bitty pieces, was more like it. Knowing that I wasn't the only one needing a crash course in polite conversation, I suddenly felt halfway decent.

Naked or not.


	9. It's Not Easy

****

IX. It's Not Easy...

It's strange, really, when you think about it. A mutant, of all people, should be the last person to be prejudiced. But I guess I'm as human as anyone else, when it comes down to it. I went into that sewer thinking that I'd found people just like me, a community where I would finally be welcome. I'd learned to distrust normal humans; but I hadn't yet gotten the message that there's bad seeds everywhere, no matter what the genome.

These sewers were longer and more twisted than most. I guessed we must have been entering a big city; later I learned we were actually underneath Rochester. As in, New York! I had no idea I'd made that much distance. It was dark inside, but I was used to that; my eyes adjust quickly, now that my pupils are slit. I know my rods and cones are altered, and my retina, too. Ever see a cat's or dog's eyes shining at night? Mine supposedly do that, too, and for the same reason. I've lost some of my color vision, though. Night is a bunch of shades of gray; but even in the day, most colors are muted, now, and red is gone completely.

Funny, it used to be my favorite color.

Toad was going on and on about something or other. I only listened with half an ear--which means, I was only paying enough attention to say, "Uh-huh," at the right moments.

"...But you'll have to watch out for snakes here and there," he was saying.

"Snakes aren't a problem," I said, and droned him out again. I was concentrating on the echo I kept hearing behind me. Finally, I stopped walking altogether. Toad went on a few steps, still chattering away, realizing a moment later that I wasn't still with him. He stopped and turned around, but I know I heard a couple more soft footsteps before they stopped, too. 

My hackles stood up, along with my spines. I felt my claws spontaneously unsheathing themselves, and my tail twitching. A primitive growl surprised me. I was even more surprised to find that it was coming from me!

"Bottle up, Mellie," Toad said brightly. "That's only me mate Cammie. Who knows right well," he said in a louder voice, "she's not supposed to be on her tod way out here!"

A small shape drifted into my vision. The girl was tiny--child-sized--and completely hairless. Her skin was a patchwork of grays and browns, which was why I couldn't see her, hiding behind us in the shadows. Her eyes were two lidless gray orbs. 

Chameleon--Cammie--went naked, like me, the better to utilize her natural camouflage, but with her coloration, it was pretty much impossible to see anything. Her voice was that of a woman, not a child, despite the fact that her body was stuck in a prepubescent shape. "Short for Chameleon," she said, and turned a brilliant green veined with gold. "What are you short for?" She smiled at me, revealing a set of sharp, rodent-like incisors.

I grinned back, showing all my fangs.

We each got the other's message, and a subconscious truce was declared. At least, temporarily.

"She's a whatdoyoucallit, a synaesthetic," Toad said.

"Synaesthetic anesthetic," Cammie added, turning a soft coral speckled with ultraviolet. "No one feels a thing." At least, I think it was coral. To me, it was a dull yellow. 

She wasn't very talkative--which I didn't really mind--but Toad tried to explain. He started pacing, as if being in motion helped him think better. Every word, he said, every sound she heard translated into colors and textures in her mind. She had to concentrate to figure out the meaning from the muddle. In fact, all the time he was explaining, Cammie's skin was changing colors and textures, sometimes almost too fast for me to follow. Apparently, what her mind saw and felt was mirrored on her skin. Eerie.

Ever watch those nature shows on TV? I used to love them (imagine that). Despite her name, what Cammie reminded me of the most was a squid. It does the same trick with its skin. I don't know what it was about that squid girl. For some reason, I disliked her immediately, and she seemed to feel the same way about me. 

Somewhere in the midst of Toad's explanation, she disappeared. He shrugged, and we started off again. And so did the phantom footsteps. It was irritating. Maybe that's why she did it.

After a while--and time seems to run differently when you're down there--I started to see a light. Yeah, and it was at the end of the tunnel, too. We came into a huge... well, room, I suppose. It was an enormous gallery. I have no idea what it was originally supposed to be used for, but the people down there used it as a main living space.

The first thing I saw were the lights. Small globes of soft light floated randomly around the room, like unblinking fireflies. They were the only thing, in that midden, that was at all pretty. Along all the walls, there were piles of old, foul bedding and clothes, plus whatever sparse belongings these people had. 

Except, there were no people.

There was, however, a big aluminum barrel sitting on a grate over a small trash fire. I suppose what was in it could be classified as food, since Toad spooned us each up a bowl.

Now, don't get edgy. I didn't take a single damn bite till I saw Toad plunk down with his own bowl and start eating. Moving a Kermit the Frog doll out of the way, I sank down on the heap of bedding next to him, but I had to shift a little to pull out the book I'd sat on. It was a much-read soft cover novelization of Episode I, with a picture of Darth Maul on the cover. I handed it to its owner with an apology for sitting on it, then started eating.

I can't say it was good. I can't even honestly say it was edible, but I ate it anyway. By now, I'd learned never to pass up a meal, even if it is rat stew. At least, I think it was rat stew. I'd never been more glad that my taste buds are piss poor these days.

I picked up the doll again. "Kermit?" I asked, smiling.

Toad chuckled. "Hey, it's not easy being green!"

A few minutes later, Cammie drifted in like a ghost. She was back to her basic brown and gray, and was somehow hard to see, especially with how the lights shifted around. I couldn't seem to focus on her till she'd sat down to eat at the other end of the room.

After she sat, though, my eyes were locked on hers, and she stared just as coldly back at me.


	10. The Gift Horse's Mouth

****

X. The Gift Horse's Mouth

Ever hear the phrase, "As different as night and day?" Well, it's taken on a whole new meaning for me. I actually met Night and Day. They were among the folks who started drifting back in near the end of the day. Everyone was a mutant, of course, and all of them were visibly mutated, like me. Well, not exactly like me, you know. I mean, they all had physical mutations. There were about fourteen or fifteen of them, more men than women. There was a haggard, deformed old woman who reeked of disease and decay; there was a man completely covered with scales--his bedroll looked like it was made of old, shed skin; there were two children, a boy and a girl, and they were twins. 

They were named after their coloration, not just their power, which they shared. Night, the boy, was black--black like me, not what people normally call "black". He was the one who produced the floating lights. His sister, Day, was as white as an albino, and she was the only one who could douse her brother's lights. They were both around nine years old; unusual to be actively mutated that young. They looked normal, other than their odd coloration--but I guess that coloration had been enough to send them down to the sewer world. Their father, as the story went, kicked them out of the house when their mutation manifested.

Their presence terrified me. I was absolutely sick with fear--but for them, not me. What do you do when there's a gun lying out with children nearby? You put it away, of course. But what do you do when you're the gun?

All the others pretty much ignored me. Almost everyone scattered during the day, only coming back in the evening. Some brought back scraps of food or clothing; others brought back wallets and cash. I have no idea how they could have spent the cash; I guess they must have had friends on the outside. But Toad stayed--and he could do that, since he was actually the de facto leader of the motley little group. He made me comfortable, kept a friendly conversation going. He even gave me this notebook and pen, said I could use it for whatever I wanted. That's when I started writing this whole thing. 

I found out later why everyone respected him. I didn't know it then, but he was incredibly strong, and at least as agile as me. That shapeless mass of clothing covered a body made mostly of compact muscle. They called him "The Terrible Toad King," which everyone--Toad himself included--laughed at.

He was great. He asked me all sorts of questions about myself, as if I actually interested him. I told him about my parents, about Ellis Island, and about what happened afterwards. Of course, while I was having myself a grand old time pouring out my history, that squid girl was always hanging around, just outside my vision. Drove me nuts. Apparently, she didn't go out and about like the others--she was too sensitive to loud noises. Aww, poor thing. But Toad seemed fascinated by my abilities, so I explained--as only the child of a scientist could--about all my oddities.

My immune system is programmed to attack any tissue it doesn't recognize. That's about normal, but my attack cells (at least, that's what I call them) do it heavy-duty. They also reproduce themselves, rather than being made by my bone marrow, and I have a lot more of them than is normal. My digestive enzymes work similarly to my T-cells. They break down organic matter at a much faster rate than is normal, and I can eat pretty much anything organic. But my venom--well, that's a whole other story. It works in three ways, but don't ask me to remember the names of all those toxins. Dad was the research scientist, not me. Anyway, the first toxin over-stimulates the pain receptors. Three guesses as to what that does. Then the next two do a double whammy on the motor neurons--first making the muscles convulse, which speeds the venom through the system; then paralyzing the muscles, which winds up stopping the heart and lungs. And to top it all off, there's a nice dose of digestive enzymes in there, too, which break down tissue.

I call it overkill, but, hey, I can't exactly do anything about it, now can I?

Then there's the whole fur thing, and the prehensile tail, and the cat's eyes, and the weird legs, and the bony cartilage under my skin, and the practically useless healing factor that only works on major injuries, damn it--and then only when I'm in a comatose state--and... Well, that's about it.

Anyway, Toad had also offered his bedroll to me. Maybe it was just a gentlemanly gesture, or maybe he wanted something else. I don't know, I don't have that kind of experience. I refused. Not out of dislike, you understand. I liked him quite a bit. He always had a smile for me, and he was the only one of the group to take an active interest in me--other than Cammie, whose interest I would have gladly done without. 

Screw my naiveté. Screw my need for naiveté. I've always known, at least on a cerebral level, that some people are just plain bad. But I've always wound up thinking of people I meet as basically good. It's a quality that's gotten me in trouble more often than I can remember, but I can't seem to shake it. I don't want to shake it. Screw my need for trust.

What I really hate, though, is being driven by my instincts. Goddammit, I am a human being, not a fucking animal! Except that I am an animal, just as much as any other dog or cat or horse or cow. I can't help what my instincts make me do, and I hate it. I am mutant, hear me roar.

Well, bitch and moan, anyway.

I slept several feet away from every other warm body, curled up on the hard floor. My habit of violent dreaming kept me from using any of their sparse bedding, but it also made me nervous. What if someone came too close while I slept? I had precious little control over my spines when I was awake; and I knew they were an accident just waiting to happen when I was asleep. The only way I can keep those damn things down is by staying calm--but being anxious about them pretty much nixed that. 

Face it, the only time I'm safe to be around is when no one's around me. Sucks, doesn't it? I came to the decision pretty quickly, and I hated it. I would have to leave. If anything happened to those two kids, well. I'm not going to bother with the whole "I'd never forgive myself" spiel.

Just think of me as the personification of a vicious cycle.

After growing up as a normal girl in a normal family, I had suddenly been made to be a complete loner. Never mind the fact that I still need human company just as much as the next mutant. So there I was, with the chance to be among people like me, who didn't hate me just because of what I am. It was like a gift from heaven. Except I couldn't keep it. Maybe there is someone out there laughing at me, after all.

Oh, and don't worry, nothing happened to the two kids.


	11. Melody Morgan

****

XI. Melody Morgan

"Did you know you're a fucking idiot?" 

You want to know the definition of disconcerting? It's hearing _that_, in a woman's voice, coming out of a child's body. 

I was sitting on a bluff off the side of an old road, overlooking an abandoned field. My back was to the manhole where I'd come out. I'd wanted a bit of privacy after several days of so much company, but it looked like I wasn't going to get any.

Right now, of course, I'd do anything for another voice to talk to.

"What?" I snapped, proving once again what I genius I am at dialogue.

Turning around, I saw Cammie climbing out, all in browns and grays. She gave me that rodent grin of hers again, and turned black laced with red. I think it was red. Her tiny body barely made a sound, even on the gravelly old road.

"Melody Morgan." Her voice was almost sing-song.

I was suddenly on my feet. I hadn't told any of them my full name, trusting them to think "Melody" was a nickname I'd given myself, much as they had named themselves. "How...?"

"They've been looking for you."

"Who?" Yes, folks, sometimes I amaze even myself. I sank to the ground again, though I wasn't sure what she'd do next.

"So you did them the favor of coming to them. And they say I'm the crazy one." 

She sat down next to me. I don't know how I controlled myself enough to stay still. If I remember correctly, right about then I was trying not to vomit. Her manner made me horribly nervous.

"Magneto broke out shortly after you happened," she said--as if I were an event. "They've been looking for you ever since they heard about you on the news. Magneto and his gang." Translucent inner lids flicked across her solid gray eyes. "Toad's one of them, you know."

I shook my head violently. "No! He's not like that!"

Cammie laughed dryly, the taunting voice suddenly gone. "I think I'd know what he's like better than you, little girl. We've been practically family for almost ten years now. Every now and then he goes off on some little job for 'His Nibs'." She paused, her throat moving in a swallow. "And every so often, the other ones come down here." Her red and black shifted to a confusion of blue and brown.

I was still shaking my head, edging away from her. She grabbed my hand--now that's balls!--and held me still. "Mystique is all blue and scaly. She's a shapeshifter, so she doesn't wear clothes, either." 

Suddenly, I heard Toad's voice in my mind: _From lovely naked ladies, sure!_

It wasn't just my head shaking now. My whole body was shuddering. All I could think was, _Not again--please, God, not again._ Every single damn time I had trusted someone to help me, I'd been betrayed. And yes, I know how melodramatic that sounds, but it's true, damn it! 

Letting my hand go, Cammie continued. "The other one, Sabretooth. He doesn't come down here much. He's like a lion-man, or maybe a bear-man." My stomach froze. A bear-man. "Got long, blond hair and a wolf-skin coat. He likes to hurt people." She wiped one eye furiously, her color shifting again faster than my eyes could follow. "We always tuck Night and Day somewhere safe when we hear Sabretooth coming."

I had to run several feet away then. All I could think of was a very different voice, belonging to a very different person. Maurice had talked about a bear-man. Long blond hair. A wolf-skin coat. A little girl, whose name had been Trish.

I collapsed in the grass and hurled. The reeking stuff sank into the ground quickly, leaving a bare, steaming patch of earth. I turned back to her and wobbled back on all fours. Then I stuffed a handful of grass in my mouth, swallowing it to clear the taste before I tried to speak.

"Why?" It was the only thing I trusted my shaky voice to say.

"Because you didn't die, of course. That machine of his, it was supposed to turn normals into mutants. But it killed them instead. Not you, though, no. They want to know why, why, why."

"I was a latent mutant anyway!" I shouted. "All this shit," and I indicated my animalistic body, "none of this should have happened!"

"You think they'd care about that? We don't much like you, Melody Morgan," Cammie said with her rodent grin. "But we don't particularly want your blood on our hands." She held her hands up, showing them to me. "Flatscan blood is better for the complexion, you know."

Even though my mind was reeling, the mental image that conjured up sobered me up real quick. I shifted away from her. "My notebook," I said. "I need to get my notebook back before I leave."

"Don't go back," she said almost pleadingly. "We'll burn it for you."

"No! I need it. I have to be able to..." To what, I couldn't quite articulate; but what it came down to was that I needed to write. I'd discovered that writing shit down was almost as good as talking about it. And since I was about to go on the run again, I was pretty damn sure I'd have a lot more shit to write about.

Cammie glanced at the sun. "Hurry up, then. He's gone for now, but he'll be back pretty quick. If you're lucky, he'll only have one of his friends with him."

Once I got back down in the underworld, I went on all fours. It was quicker that way. I wound my way back to the central gallery, only making one or two wrong turns. I had to get my notebook back. Idiot. I was such a fucking idiot. Cammie was right. Cammie was... Nuts.

Why the hell had he given me the damn thing, anyway? Surely, he didn't need me to write out my history, now that I'd already told him everything. It had seemed like just a friendly gesture, from someone who had seemed to need a simple friend just as much as I had. He may have been the leader down there, but none of the others were really close. Except Cammie.

Was she really as crazy as she sounded? Or was all this just some fit of jealousy on her part? 

I grabbed my notebook, but just sat down again. I would wait, I decided, and talk it out with Toad. Surely there was some sort of explanation. All I wanted to hear was, 'That Cammie, she can be such a jealous bitch sometimes.' That's all I was waiting for. Then I would leave. I had decided to leave anyway, after all.

It wasn't until Toad got back that I started to wonder how Cammie knew about the bear-man.

"Hey," I greeted him when he sauntered in. "I think I need to be moving on."

"No," he said with a smile. "You don't."

"Toad, I just don't feel that I'm safe enough to be around other people for that long. I'm worried about the kids."

His smile widened into a grin, and I suddenly caught a gleam in his eye that I hadn't seen before. No, I'd seen it. I'd just ignored it. No one who treated me the way he did could possibly be like that, could they? 

He licked his lips. Was he enjoying this?


	12. Instincts and Water Balloons

****

XII. Instincts and Water Balloons

"I can't stay," I said, hoping my voice wasn't as shaky as it sounded to me. "I wish I could." Yeah, and I wish I was a better liar, too.

Toad didn't say anything then, just watched me. I turned around. I started walking away. Was he letting me go? 

I got as far as the corridor. Toad was waiting for me out in the tunnel--but he was behind me, too, when I turned back. Both gave me the same cold grin, but the one behind me lashed out with his tongue. It caught me around the ankle and yanked me off my feet. The second Toad stomped--hard--on my right knee, dislocating the kneecap.

I screamed and lashed out at the Toad who was leering over me. My claws couldn't find any purchase in his clothes, though. Wherever my claws went, he suddenly wasn't there. Toad--one of them, anyway--laughed. Finally, one said to the other, "Had your fill, yet, Mystique?"

The Toad above me stopped to glance at the Toad across the room. I took advantage of the distraction, and used his--whichever was the real one--trick on the one nearest me. My tail slipped around his legs and swept him off his feet. I made a grab for the notebook I'd dropped; I sure as hell wasn't leaving it behind, not after all this trouble just to get it back.

Clenching the notebook in my teeth, trying not to get any saliva on it, I ran out on all fours--well, on all threes, anyway. Being able to go quadrupedal has its advantages. Even if you're one limb short, you've still got three left to choose from.

I didn't look for an exit. I figured that was the first thing they'd expect me to do. Instead, I went down.

The sewers were built layer upon layer upon layer. I descended as far as I could go, till I couldn't hear any more artificial noises from the pipes or cables or wires. Don't ask me how far down I went, or how long it took me to get there, but when I finally stopped to rest, I could barely see anymore. Not even with my particular vision. Almost on instinct, I'd managed to snag a couple of rats that'd had the bad luck to run across my path. These I hung onto by their tails, waiting for... what?

There I was, going on instinct again. I didn't have much choice about it, though. This was the sort of situation when my subconscious mind knew best. 

I took the notebook out of my mouth and hobbled up onto two legs again, clenching my teeth against the pain and shock of my knee. There's something about a dislocated kneecap that goes beyond just the physical. It's a wrongness that your body can't handle, as though part of your mind has been dislocated, too. The kneecap had slid back into place, but I could feel built-up fluid squishing around it with every step I took. Thinking back now, I'm pretty sure that some of the ligaments in there had been torn, too. I don't know if I'd have needed to go under, otherwise.

After a while, I knew I had to find a good hiding place. An enormous fatigue was pressing down on me, so that I could barely even think. My running (more like limping) on automatic may have saved me then: somehow, I found a niche in the side of the tunnel--a crack, really, where two sections didn't quite meet anymore. It was just large enough for me to squeeze in, with barely enough room for me to sit down. I stuck my notebook in, then tossed the two rat carcasses on top of it, then stuffed myself in as far as I could go. I remember feeling the peculiar pulling sensation of my quills standing at attention; then I fell asleep. 

It's not like normal sleep, when I go under like that. The phrase "falling asleep" fits, though. It really is like falling into an abyss, into oblivion. I even tend to have an instant of panic, as if my body thinks it's really tumbling. Normally, when I have a falling dream, I jerk awake; but this is like plummeting for what could be only a few seconds, or many hours, before I lose consciousness completely.

I never do know how much time passes, exactly. It could be an hour, it could be days. Maybe I should shoot myself in the foot, then set a timer before I go under.

Last time it happened, it took me a few minutes to wake up and reorient myself. This time, I simply went from full unconsciousness to full awareness. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. I sat completely still, barely even breathing, and just listened. No voices. No electrical humming. A faint trickle in the background, but no artificial sounds at all. My spines were still on full alert, and I didn't press the issue. This time, I figured they knew what they were doing.

Pulling myself out was easier than cramming myself into that little nook. I'd lost weight--muscle mass, it seemed like, since I don't have that much fat. I picked up my notebook and the two rat corpses. Make that the two rat water balloons.

I can't tell you how disgusting that was. I'd killed them quickly with my venom--they usually bite when I try to break their necks--but in the time that I'd been out of it, their internal tissue had dissolved almost completely. I could barely even feel any bones in there any more--just a hint of a skull in each. I had to have food, though, or I really would starve. So I made a careful slit in their bellies and... well... drank them down, one after the other. It was awful. Only my immediate need for sustenance kept me from spewing the foul stuff right back out.

Next time, I'm just going to gather some greenery beforehand, or something. Yeah, like when I have the chance to set a timer.

There's another advantage to going on all fours. My hands can feel out any obstacles or potentially noisy bits of litter before my feet step on them. I'm not too humble to say that I can go really quietly when I need to. Creep forward a few paces, then crouch still and listen. Creep forward, crouch, listen.

There's only one person who was better at sneaking around than me. Cammie found me as I was trying to make my way out.


	13. The Other Shoe

****

XIII. The Other Shoe

"I've been looking for you," Cammie hissed at me from out of the darkness.

I froze. A vague figure moved out of the corner of my eye, but as usual, I couldn't get a lock on Cammie's body when she was this well camouflaged. "Where are you?" I whispered back. It was ridiculous to whisper, of course--the sibilance echoed almost as much as normal speech would have.

A splash of colors from somewhere ahead, and she said, "Follow me. I can get you out of here."

Could she? Mystique had mimicked Toad. How well would she mimic Cammie's flashing colors--or her small size? But I couldn't tell from so far away, in that darkness, if Cammie had suddenly had a growth spurt.

I had no choice but to keep track of her--if it really was her. 

She led me to the trickle of water I'd heard when I had woken up. Somewhere above me, in the pipes running along the ceiling, I heard her voice again. "That water comes in from the river. It'll lead you out safely!"

"Come down here where I can see you!" I said back, but I guess she was gone.

Indecision is like pain. It lets you know you're still alive to make a decision. What the hell--either I'd get out, or I wouldn't. How many exits could two mutants cover, after all?

Just to be sure, I bent down, scooped up a handful of water, and cautiously tasted it. It may have been a little dirty, but nothing like the sludge that normally flowed in the sewers. Water that fresh would have had to come from the outside.

I tucked my precious notebook under one arm and started walking.

The trickle of water became a runnel, then a stream. The light grew, and I could see the source, just a few hundred yards away, where the sewer opened out at the river. I would have broken into a run right then--but a shadowed figure abruptly appeared in the circle of light. It was a short, stocky man in bulky clothes. Toad. Then it was a woman, tall and slim. Mystique?

I stopped where I stood. Had--he? she?--seen me?

"This has gone far enough, Mortimer!" It was Cammie's voice, at the edge of the light up ahead, not far from the exit. "She's a mutant! I couldn't care less about the humans, but you let her go!"

Three guesses as to who "her" was.

"I don't think so." The figure outlined by the light shifted again. The legs bent, the back grew webbed spines, and a long tail sprouted.

I've heard that people sometimes mistake panic attacks for heart attacks. I used to think those folks were just idiots. Now I can see why they do--my throat constricted, my chest hurt, and I felt a wash of nausea. It hurt to breathe. But my heart was beating just fine: for a few minutes, it was all I could hear, despite the argument going on just a little ways ahead of me. Right about then, I could have used a stopped heart--at least then I could have heard everything they were saying. As it was, all I caught was "Magneto" and "father" and "mistake."

Fuck it. I had to go, to get out. I was a fast runner, I could maybe get past Toad and Mystique before they could stop me.

I'd worry about swimming--or not--when I got to the river.

Cats like to sneak up on their prey before the chase, to get as close as possible. I'm no cat, but I've developed the same skill, and for the same reason. I don't care how much venom I've got, I still have to catch the little buggers first. This was no hunt, though--or at least, I wasn't the hunter. I hugged my notebook to my chest and slid alongside the wall, keeping one eye on the silhouettes ahead--there were two of them now--and the other on the filthy, wet ground at my feet. 

In the movies, this is the point where the tiptoer's foot snaps a twig. In reality, this was the point where the world turned me upside down again. Just for fun.

"Melody, run for it!" 

I ran for it.

Excuse me; make that, I fell for it.

Trust me on this one: when someone says, "Run for it," you run the OTHER way. Toad's tongue caught me around the throat. I managed to stay on my feet this time, though. Wrapping my tail around my notebook (the cause of all this trouble) I grabbed the long, sticky tongue and bit. 

Oh, man, and I thought the liquefied rats were disgusting. 

Toad yelped and reeled his tongue back in. Cammie--the real Cammie, this time--jumped on Mystique's back, paying no attention to the fake spines. Toad was caught between making another grab for me, and pulling a seriously pissed little mutant off an even angrier, bigger one. And that's when the universe pulled another one of those tricks it likes so much.

That's right, there was a metal grate sealing the sewer opening. From a distance, the light had obscured the bars. This was just getting better and better.

"Get her!" someone shouted. Not sure who the "her" was this time, but I'm fairly certain it wasn't Cammie doing the shouting. She would never have said anything as lame as that. Or at least, she'd have said it more colorfully.

I managed to kick the rusty grate a couple times, and it came slightly loose. Thank God for lax upkeep. Mystique threw Cammie off her back and came for me. I turned around and kicked her instead of the grate; she went flying and didn't come back. Spring-loaded legs are a thing of beauty.

Toad finally caught Cammie, locking his arms around her struggles. He cocked his head at me, smiling. "Come with me, Mellie. I'll take you to where we've got your mum and dad."

I froze in the middle of kicking the grate again. Somewhere in the middle of the fight, Cammie had produced two tiny knives. Hell if I know where she'd been keeping them. One of them had scored Toad's side, ripping into his layers of clothing. I didn't know whether the stain leaking onto the cloth was blood or just sweat.

"No!" Cammie yelled, flailing again with her sharp little friends. "He doesn't have your parents--" she swiped out, but Toad caught both her wrists in one hand--"none of them do! Just ru--" His grin becoming a grimace, Toad snapped her neck. Her skin flashed through a confusion of colors, then briefly settled on a muddle of blues, before fading to a flat gray.

I stared at Toad, let my claws come out. Let the venom drip from them. Let him know what I was willing to do if he came after me again. He dropped Cammie's body and held out one hand to me. "Magneto quite liked the chat he had with your dad--intelligent chap, he said. Please, Mellie."

The grate only took one more kick, and then it fell out. I climbed out slowly, not taking my eyes off Toad. He watched me just as carefully. It was when I had one foot in the shallows that he used that wicked tongue again. The end struck me square in the chest, flipping me all the way out into the river, goddamn notebook and all. 

Did Toad know I couldn't swim? And had he really seen my parents? Were they still alive?

I can't help but ask all these questions. If you were me, you would, too. All I know is, every choice I've made since Ellis Island has wound up bad. I'm still not sure I deserve what Cammie gave me.


	14. The Middle of Nowhere

****

XIV. The Middle of Nowhere 

I can't float--I can barely even swim--because my extra bone mass makes me that much heavier and denser. It could have been hours later, or only a few minutes, when the river spat me out. Not sure how many times that makes, that I've been so close to death. Maybe the river just didn't want me. I crawled up on the bank, coughing and vomiting water. 

It was broad daylight, and there were quite a few people on the road above me--cars and pedestrians both. 

I didn't care. There were honks and catcalls, even a shriek or two. I stood up and started walking. Somehow, I still had my notebook with me, but it was completely ruined now. Figures. I kept hold of it, though. No way was I just going to throw away something that had cost me so much.

The riverbank sloped up, like a levy, to a metal curb guard. Beyond that was a two-lane road, lined with small shops and restaurants. People stopped and stared at me, the mutie, as I trudged along, keeping the curb guard between myself and everyone else. I didn't know where I was going, or what I would do when I got there. Like I said, I didn't care.

Suddenly, a small, tan two-door car pulled up on the nonexistent shoulder, right next to me. The passenger door popped open, and a voice shouted, "For God's sake, get in before somebody calls the cops!"

I bent down, looked in. It was a black woman, fortyish I suppose, with hair braided into a million or so cornrows. She was wearing what looked like a leotard and a pair of jeans. With a wave of her hand, she said, "Come on, I'm not gonna hurt you--I've got a few friends who are mutants. You look like you could use a lift."

What the hell. I shrugged, climbed over the curb guard, and slid into the front seat of the car. 

"I'm Stevie Hunter." The woman held her hand out, obviously expecting me to take it.

I didn't.

"Well, then." She shifted gears, and got back onto the road. I watched in the side mirror as the crowd of people started to disperse, robbed of their afternoon's diversion. 

"So, where are you headed?" Stevie asked. 

I wrapped my arms around myself, cold and wet. I didn't answer, didn't look at her.

"Ohh... kay. I'm coming back from visiting some family, and I'm headed north. That suit you?"

I nodded. If she would only shut up, maybe I could catch a nap.

But she didn't. She rambled on about her dance class, about her students, one in particular. How Kitty was a mutant, how she could phase through things, how well she danced. How pretty she was.

"Are you trying to make me feel better about myself?" Stevie nearly jumped out of her skin at the sound of my voice. I knew she was just making polite talk, of course. But something about her got on my nerves in a big way. I squirmed in my seat, trying to lean back hard enough to keep my quills down.

"No, just... Just trying to make you comfortable. There are people who are on your side, you know. Not everybody hates mutants."

My temper snapped. "You think just because you're black, you can understand me? One minority to another, is that it?? I'm no fucking Rosa Parks--at least she could get on a bus!"

There was a long, embarrassed silence. Stevie almost spoke several times, but never quite got there. We drove on without speaking for something around an hour. Finally, she turned on her radio. It was tuned to a classical station. I don't know what was playing, but it was beautiful. I stared out the window, avoiding Stevie's sidelong glances, doing my damndest not to cry. How long had it been since I'd heard music of any kind?

My spines were digging into the backrest. Before long, they'd go off. I could feel my hackles standing up. My lips kept wanting to snarl. Finally, I asked Stevie to pull over.

"What? We're in the middle of nowhere! Where'll you go?" She stopped the car at the side of the road, though. We'd gone long past the last town, where I'd made such a show.

"Nowhere," I growled, and got out.

As soon as I closed the car door, as soon as Stevie Hunter drove away, I felt better. My quills relaxed, my claws stopped clenching. It even became easier to breathe. The tears that had clutched at my throat were gone. I realized something then: I had the same reaction to Stevie that I'd had to Cammie.

I think that was the day I lost my faith. It sounds so cliche, but it's true. I didn't stop believing because of all the shit that had happened, or anything like that, but because all rhyme and reason had drained out of my world. Up till then, some part of me had still trusted that everything would work out--that this was all for a reason. Now, though, I knew that the world just didn't make sense. It never had. Here I was, completely sterile, and I couldn't stand to be around another woman. I had hated Cammie, I had hated Stevie. When I'm completely honest with myself, I can admit that I could barely even stand to be around my own mother. Her sketches of me had made me look so beautiful. She hadn't become stuffy or overbearing. I'd become... what? 

It makes no sense, you know? Why be so... territorial, I guess... when I will never have a reason? Why stick me with an instinctive hatred of other women, when there will never be a chance for any sort of competition? It just makes no sense.

None of it does.

I slipped into the woods near the road and kept going. After about a day of walking, I stopped hearing any human noises. No cars. No machinery. No technology. The piece of land I was in, as I eventually figured out, was about nine or ten acres of undeveloped land. Being not too far from Lake Ontario, it was marshy in too many places to be potentially valuable. I wouldn't have called it scrubland, exactly, but it wasn't quite a forest, either. It was pretty rocky, though, with huge slabs of granite left over from the last ice age.

I found a great heaping pile of these boulders. They were a stark gray, light in the daytime, but dark at night. There was... not a cave, exactly, but a little hole near the base, where several of the enormous rocks leaned together. It was just big enough for me to sit or lie down in comfortably. I spent the last of that day gathering brush and grasses to line the floor inside--eating almost as much as I used--and slept there that night.


	15. Once a Human

****

XV. Once a Human

Summer was hot; winter was cold. I survived. Spring was warm, green, and beautiful. I survived that, too. I took my battered and wrinkled notebook and buried it under the layer of grass and leaves in my little hole. The cracks and chinks in the rocks where the wind and rain could come in, I plugged up with a mud and grass mixture. I thought it was just a quick and dirty fix, but before long there were weeds growing from the dirt patches, holding them secure.

My territory stretched a good half day's four-legged lope in every direction from my den. It overlapped with a few other animals', including a pair of hawks, several weasels, and a large bobcat. It was a smaller area than other animals my size needed, but I wasn't picky about food. Grass, leaves, mushrooms, bark, berries, acorns--I ate it all. On top of that, there were always squirrels, mice, birds' eggs, rabbits, snakes, and any other small animals I could get my hands on. I was careful, though, making sure I never over-hunted any animals, even leaving at least one egg whenever I robbed nests. After all, my neighbors needed to eat, too. 

The mutant conservationist. Go me.

It wasn't all hunt this, gather that, of course. Large parts of my days and nights were spent watching: watching the birds chase each other, and the squirrels argue vehemently over nothing; watching the hawks stoop and waiting to see if they'd caught anything. I once spent the better part of an afternoon watching an assembly line of ants taking apart a dead grasshopper.

Sometimes I imagined that Mom and Dad were there. Other days, when I felt in need of a good argument, I would pretend that it was Cammie I was fighting with. After I figured out fire, I had a little conversation with my "parents"--me showing them how I'd done it, them congratulating me on my genius. Eventually, though, I stopped making fires. Not that I didn't prefer cooked meat to raw, but a campfire was too likely, especially at night, to be spotted by a helicopter or low-flying plane. I didn't want that sort of company. 

On the darkest nights, it was almost as if my imaginary family were really there. I could close my eyes and hear them breathing. After a while, though, I stopped talking to my three ghosts. I even stopped talking to myself. The few times I spoke aloud anymore, it always startled me to hear my own voice.

I still remember one evening in particular, when I spent the night away from my den. I'd settled into a clump of tall weeds and was thinking about sleeping there. I'd been lying there for some time, practicing my usual hobby of watching. The birds had all put themselves to bed; a skunk had trundled through a few minutes before, leaving its little paw prints in the soft ground.

Now, I've seen Lady Liberty's torch explode into radiance, and I've seen a girl-woman's thoughts and emotions painted randomly across her skin. That night, though, I saw a sort of determination and elegance that's stuck with me ever since.

The bobcat and I saw each other at the same time, I think. I watched its funny little tail twitch in something like annoyance or anxiety, so I dropped my eyes and looked away, hoping it got the message that I wasn't a threat. It stayed, so I guess it did. The cat was on the other side of the tiny clearing, hiding in a bit of brush, like me. Unlike me, though, it was on the prowl. 

It didn't have to wait long.

A shrew edged its way out, following along in the skunk's tracks, its nose twitching insanely. I suppose it must not have smelled the bobcat--or the owl. The enormous bird glided out like a ghost and caught that shrew right up without a sound. It rose quickly, prey clutched tightly; on its downbeat, though, the bobcat bounded out. That bobcat... Man, I have never seen agility like that. The bobcat leapt seven, eight feet straight in the air and snatched that shrew right out of the owl's talons. Just like that. That picture, that mental image of the bobcat's skill and vigor, has hung in my mind for a long time.

Two days later, I tracked that bobcat down and killed it. Just to see if I could.

Standing over the cat's body, I realized why it had been so desperate as to rob an owl with a larger predator--me--not ten feet away. It was a nursing mother. By now, of course, her kittens--two? three? more?--are dead, taken by starvation or predators. I didn't bother trying to bury the body. These claws are made for killing, not digging. I built a fire, the first in months, and burned the cat. Then I dug out my mildewy old notebook and started reading. 

The ink had bled, and some of the pages were stuck together, but I could still make it out. The next day, I left my little hole in the rocks and started walking, notebook in hand. I needed to find a new one, after all. That meant I needed to go where there were people. I needed to be human again.

I wasn't really looking for other people, of course. I'm still not quite sure what it is I was looking for. Maybe I was just trying to find a way to resolve everything. I actually caught myself heading south for a while, back to Rochester and what had almost happened there. I had to deliberately force myself away from that trail. Since then, though, I've given up wondering about my subconscious.

The long autumn was beginning to set in, and the leaves must have been turning all shades of fire; but they were dirty yellow to me. The air took on a continuous odor of cinnamon and smoke. Fall used to be my favorite season; that was before I lost my red vision, and before I could no longer huddle in a heated house when winter came. I like spring the best now--I know that winter is over for another year, and there's suddenly food everywhere. Warmth and food: these are the most important things in my life now.

I took to the trees when I saw him. He was grilling venison over a campfire, his rifle perched against the same tree as him. He sat on the bare ground, one leg tossed easily over the other. I followed him for a day and a half, from one campsite to the next, staying in the treetops as much as I could.

One afternoon, he brought back a freshly killed deer. Watching him skin and gut it, I was almost drooling. He threw it on a spit over his fire.

Then he left. 

After a while, with the meat searing, sending out such an incredible aroma, I couldn't resist anymore. I climbed down quietly and stole the meat.


	16. Solitary Solidarity

****

XVI. Solitary Solidarity

He knew I was there, of course. No experienced woodsman would ever leave a campfire untended. When he came back, though, he pretended that I hadn't banked his fire for him--or that I'd stolen his food. 

And me? Well, I pretended that he was just talking to himself.

"Looks like somebody was hungry," he said, loudly enough for any eavesdroppers to hear. "Guess it's a good thing I brought more." He set his pack down and started taking out more food, before closing the pack up again. There were cans of beans and pineapples, a package of smoked sausage, and a bag of apples. There was also a bag of marshmallows--proving that he really was an old hand at camping.

The man had a sort of young-old look. He could have been anywhere from his thirties to his fifties. I don't know, maybe I'm suddenly sprouting a poetic streak, but he moved like someone who'd seen a lot more years than that. He was dressed plainly in a leather jacket, flannel shirt, and jeans, all of which looked like they'd seen better times--not to mention a washing machine. He knew what he was doing, though--ate when he wanted to, slept when he felt like it. As though he knew what it was like when your only clock was the sun.

That night, he ate the beans and pineapples himself and put the rest of the food away. No doubt he knew how much it tempted me. He slept lightly, though, so I had to find my own food. But the following morning, he put the sausage on the spit. Oh, man. Have you ever smelled smoked sausage cooking over a campfire? This beautiful, spicy, greasy, smoky scent--and me up a tree, like a scared squirrel. So he pretended to fall asleep, and I pretended that he wasn't leaving food out for a half-wild mutant.

He finally seduced me with the marshmallows.

I don't mean that in the literal sense, of course--but imagine not having had any sugar in practically forever. Wow. Just, wow. Yeah, I know my sense of taste isn't what it used to be, but I still have a major sweet tooth. Now that I think about it, it's a good thing he didn't make s'mores. I think I would have embarrassed myself.

"How old are you, kid?" His voice was deep and gruff. He wasn't playing possum anymore, but he wasn't looking at me, either. Just calmly turning his own marshmallow stick over the fire. Letting me run, if I really wanted to.

"Um... What's the date?" I guess I didn't want to run, after all.

He told me.

"Shit! Oh, sorry," I caught myself. "I'm... wow, seventeen now. I guess I didn't realize how much time had actually passed." 

He shrugged. "It happens." Then he looked me in the eye for the first time. "So... You gonna live out here forever, or what?"

I guess I was more disappointed at this than surprised. My hackles came straight up, so hard that the base of my spines hurt. "I suppose you have a better idea?"

He pulled his marshmallow off the end of his stick, popped it in his mouth, and chewed for a moment. "Look, all I can offer you is food and warmth. Whether you want to stay is up to you."

I ate another marshmallow. "Where is it?" I finally asked.

"South and east a little ways," he said, jerking his thumb in that direction. "I've been living there a while now. It's safe enough." He snorted. "If you don't mind the stuck-up folks who live there." He looked at the burnt end of his stick. "And don't worry about the marshmallows, kid."

"Huh?" I looked down at the bag at my side. It was empty. Good grief, how the hell did that happen?

"Go ahead and sleep on it." He got up and tossed me a spare blanket out of his pack. "But I'll be leaving tomorrow."

I barely heard what he said. His pack was lying open, showing a cell phone, a cigar case, and a _notebook_ among the rest of his camping gear. I waited till he started snoring before I slid the notebook out, found a pen, and started writing again. 

What the hell was I thinking that night? I knew I'd go with him, and I knew it would end just as badly as everything else had, despite his reassurances. How could it be any different? Maybe after this latest bullshit was over, I'd go back to Rochester after all. Put an end to that bit of my life once and for all. Or start a new one--hell, I figured I knew where Magneto's rhetoric was coming from. Maybe I could join him; maybe I could kill him.

It was barely edging into dawn when I finally put the notebook down, yawning.

I suppose, when you haven't seen another human being in so long, other concerns kind of get thrown to the wind. Especially so late at night--well, early in the morning, actually. Not thinking about what I was doing, I picked up my blanket and moved over next to the stranger. I was curled up a hair's breadth away from him when I fell asleep. Oh, I knew very well how dangerous that was, that I might well hurt him in my sleep. But what the hell, he'd probably turn on me anyway, same as damn near everyone else had, other than my parents.

All I wanted was a little human contact, for as long as I could have it. When I woke up later in the morning, though, he was gone.


	17. Rhyme nor Reason

****

XVII. Rhyme nor Reason

His truck was parked on an old, abandoned gravel road about a mile's walk away from the campsite. It might have been blue, but I couldn't tell under all the dust and dried mud. I've never been good with makes and models, but it reminded me of the truck my grandfather used to drive, especially with the bed covered. I don't know why I'd tracked him down--I was just digging myself deeper. He had finished stowing his supplies in the bed and was talking on his cell phone.

"Yeah, Red, she's the one Chuck saw... What, you mean that old bastard knows her father? Any connection between Rogue and--" He stiffened suddenly, and sniffed the air. "Crap. Gotta go." Flipping the phone shut, he turned around and gave me a cautious smile. "Morning."

"Who are you?" Yeah, I know, I could have thought up a better greeting; but right about then, I wasn't feeling particularly courteous.

"Name's Logan. I work for a guy who runs a school."

"Really." I crossed my arms and turned just enough that he--that Logan--could see my erect quills. It was nice and sunny, so the yellow and black pattern on the webbing must have stood out nicely. Logan's eyes narrowed, and his nostrils flared: he got the message.

"Look, kid, I'm not gonna hurt you."

"I don't think that's what I'd be worried about, if I were you." Man, I was pissed. I don't think I'd have had the balls (metaphorical, of course) to say that, otherwise. 

His laugh was short and sharp. "You couldn't even touch me." A trio of metal claws popped out of the knuckles on his left hand. 

Holy shit. 

He rolled up his right sleeve and sliced his own arm right open. I caught a flash of metal under the flesh and suddenly felt like I was in a Terminator movie. Except that he was no Ah-nuld, and he didn't pull the skin off. Thank God. Instead, the wound closed right back up as I watched. Just like that. I think my eyes were bugging out right about then.

I started laughing. I laughed so hard, I actually had to sit down. I laughed so hard it hurt, and I didn't even realize I was crying till the tears soaked through my fur. That son of a bitch.

"Hey, hey, whoa, kid." Logan was suddenly crouching there at my side, one arm lightly on my shoulder. "What's wrong, Melody?" 

"You--" I gasped. "Do you have any idea how fucking lucky you are? I have to be unconscious for mine to work!" I wiped my eyes. "Goddamn it. Someone up there has a really twisted sense of humor."

Logan laughed dryly. "Damn straight." He rose and backed off then, gave me some room to breathe after my outburst. I guess he knew I needed some space.

"Wait a minute. You know my name?" Deja vu all over again. My spines and I stood back up at the same time.

"Well, your dad used to correspond with a... friend, I guess... of my boss. Chuck knew all about you, so when your parents disappeared, we started looking for you."

"Yeah, well, you're not the only one looking for me." Tail twitching, I stalked off into the woods a few hundred yards and found a handy tree. Sharpening my claws is a great way to relieve tension, though not too healthy for the poor tree. The man had left me alone that morning, probably just to let me think things through. But he'd taken his notebook back--and mine, too... and he'd been having a nice little private phone conversation about me... and he admitted being sent to pick me up. 

Well, I'd always wanted to be popular.

He was leaning on the side of his truck, chewing on a cigar, when I came back. I guess he didn't care much about the dirt on the truck. I took a deep breath and hoped I wouldn't fall into another fit of hysterics. I'd been away from people far too long.

"Okay," I said. "Let's go." 

In a few minutes, we were on I-90. Was it luck or was it deliberate that his windows were tinted? I didn't care--all I knew was, I could stare out at all the other people on the road, and they couldn't see me. Handy.

"So what do you do?" Logan asked. I guessed he was talking about my mutations. "I mean, aside from the obvious."

Was this guy serious? I swallowed my first sarcastic response and explained everything.

"Jesus," he said.

"No shit," I agreed. 

The conversation went on like that for a few minutes, then dropped off. I took the opportunity to pull the two notebooks out. He'd tossed them on the back seat--in case I wanted them, he said. I spent most of the rest of the trip copying from the old notebook to the new one, putting everything in order. The memory of where I was when I'd first written down most of it hurt. 

I couldn't believe I actually missed that Cockney son of a bitch. I still can't believe it. I wonder what Cammie would say, if she knew. She'd probably laugh at me.

It was almost dark when we got there. I rubbed my eyes--partly because I'd been asleep, partly because I couldn't believe what I was seeing. There was a basketball court and gardens in front of the mansion. Yes, I said mansion. I'm guessing a lot of money went into it. I didn't really relax, though, until we got to the door. Peeking inside, I saw several handfuls of kids, some younger than me, some older. Some my age, I'm sure. They looked happy.

A woman came to the door. She had dark skin and white hair--sounds weird, I know, but she was gorgeous.

I hated her on sight.

This is so hard to write about. The only reason I can is that Logan let me keep the notebook and pen. 

So she comes to the door, and she and Logan have a nice little chat--about me, of course. She's looking me up and down, much too polite and well-bred to notice how my hackles are standing straight up. She's staring right at me, but she asks Logan, "What, exactly, is her mutation, Logan?" 

God, I've always hated it when people talk about me like I'm not even there. I mean, she was looking at me! And she couldn't tell?

"I have great digestion," I snapped.

The bitch arched one pretty, white eyebrow. "Logan?" 

He turned to me and smiled. "So, you gonna come in, or what?" he asked, jerking his thumb at the door.

Some of the kids inside had stopped whatever game they were playing and were peeking around the white-haired woman. One of the girls smiled at me. I almost ran right then.

I reached out, rubbed the smooth skin on his arm where he'd shown me just that morning that I couldn't hurt him. He covered my hand with his, but I pulled away, backing off several steps. "How do you... how do you deal with it, Logan?" He was the only other mutant I'd met with a healing factor. He was the only one who'd know what I meant. Maybe he'd explain it to them when I left.

"One day at a time."


	18. Forth and Back

****

XVIII. Forth and Back

I suppose I could say that I don't know why I went back. That would be a lie, though. What do you do when life throws you nothing but curve balls? You hit 'em back and try your best to catch the pitcher in the nuggets. 

I left the school because I was still too much the half-wild mutant; I went back to Rochester because I was tired of living as less than human. 

Oh, I didn't get there overnight, of course. Rochester is on the other side of the state from Westchester. It took almost three weeks just to get into the same county, because New York state is mostly just a network of roads and towns. I did the same old, same old. It was kind of scary, actually, knowing how to skulk across a highway at night, because I'd done it so many times before. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing.

It was about a month later, give or take, when I found myself back in that bare field where Cammie had tried to warn me off. It was a full moon, but I wasn't worried about anyone seeing me; the field was almost deserted. Let me rephrase that: I wasn't worried about anyone _human_ seeing me. Now, even on a moonless night, when the stars are clouded over, I can see pretty well. But that night, it might as well have been broad daylight. 

The stars were out, and without the streetlights that pollute the city skies, I thought maybe I could see all the way to the other side of the galaxy. I'd been so used to sticking to sewers and woods, it wasn't often I got to treat myself to this view. Everything down here seemed so much less important when I thought about how small I was compared to the rest of the universe.

Earth to Melody. When you're living on the run, you don't get to let your mind wander too long.

I'm pretty sure I saw Night and Day before they saw me, because their will-o-the-wisps were floating around the field. They could only play outside at night, when no one would see them. I had just enough time to be angry about the injustice of that before:

"Cute kids, huh?" The voice was rough and deep, and sounded like its owner had never quite learned to talk around his fangs. I turned around to find the largest man I'd ever seen looking down at me. He had long blond hair and a wolf-skin coat.

Oh. Shit.

He smiled at me, and it wasn't pretty. "We've been looking for you, little girl. We can do this the easy way, or--" and he showed me his claws--"we can do it my way."

I wasn't in much of a giggling mood just then, but looking back on it as I write this down, I can't help but laugh. I mean, where the hell did this guy learn his lines? I guess I must have been more angry at that point than afraid. "You don't have to force me, you know," I snapped. "I came back on my own."

We went down into the sewers. The first thing that hit me was the smell. The odor of a sewer's not really a stench, once you get used to it--but it nearly bowled me over all the same. They say smell and memory are right next door to each other in the brain, and I can believe it. Crawling down the ladders and walking through the tunnels was like delving back into my past. Everything was so much the same. I almost expected to hear phantom footsteps tailing us. 

At first, it looked like the gallery had fewer piles of dirty bedding; but the ones that were left were larger, so I guess nothing was actually missing. Except the people, apparently. Toad was still there, though. He was pacing the whole room, back and forth, forth and back. Like he was waiting. Like he was nervous.

The big man behind me said, "I brought someone back with me." 

When Toad saw me, it looked like he wanted to smile, but was afraid to. I walked right up to him and slapped him. God, that felt good. "You killed Cammie."

"I thought you hated her." That soft tenor voice only irritated me more.

"I did. But I didn't kill her."

"She was nuts." That was the bear-man again. Sabretooth, that's what Cammie had called him.

I looked him up and down. "Uh-huh." I'm not too sure I didn't have a death wish right then, talking to the beast of a man that way. "And you're not? You killed a little girl." Of course, I had murdered the girl's father and neighbor, but I wasn't up to mentioning that to him.

"I'm not the only one who's killed," he snarled, then stalked out of the room. How had he known about--oh. He wasn't talking about me... 

I turned back to Toad. He slumped, making himself seem even shorter. "I had to. Her mutation made her go mad. She couldn't understand what people were saying half the time anymore. It was all muddled up in her head with every other sense. Her brain just... shorted out after a while." I thought about Cammie wildly punching and biting Mystique. I thought about how her personality changed as quickly as her skin. I thought about her casually savage remarks, and about those two little knives.

__

Flatscan blood is better for the complexion, you know, Cammie's voice said in my head, and I shivered. Maybe that automatic hatred I'd had for her wasn't so far off, after all.

I wasn't ready to let go of my anger, though. "And you attacked me." I didn't want to find out what was underneath that anger.

He shrugged a little, trying not to look at me. "I... just wanted you to stay with me."

"Yeah, right. And what about that shape-shifter?"

"Mystique? Well, she's just a right bitch, is all." He laughed. It sounded good. 

We stood there looking at each other for a long moment. Eventually, I realized I was smiling.

Here's a hint: when you have a grudge, hold it for just a little while longer. That way you won't act idiotic like me.

"So what now?" I asked.

"Ever fly in a helicopter?"


	19. They Found Him Guilty

****

XIX. "They Found Him Guilty" 

Magneto is always well dressed--almost too well dressed. He carries himself as if he were nobility, and his expression is one of constant calculation. He has a full head of silver hair, groomed to perfection. When he looks you in the eye, you get the feeling you're being weighed and measured. A lot of folks call Magneto a criminal. They say he's evil, ruthless, uncaring. 

They're all wrong. Magneto's a survivor.

I think maybe he's seen more evil firsthand than most of the rest of the world put together. "Holocaust" is such an easy word to say. "Horror" is another word, but it's been used so often, too. "Hell" is another way to describe it. Terror, hopelessness, nightmare, the words can go on and on, but they don't do justice, even to the pictures. 

"Hell" is a word that I've become acquainted with. Now I get "denial" and "anger," too.

The helicopter took us out to sea, to an island too small for anyone to really take notice of. It turned out that Mystique was piloting, but she stayed out of my way, and I stayed out of hers. Toad took me to a small room and asked me to wait.

The walls were all metal--steel, it looked like--and raw stone. There was one window. I looked out briefly and saw nothing but waves.

The room was something like a cross between a hospital waiting room and a private office. There were a few chairs along the wall, but there was also a desk. On the desk lay an old brown manila folder, full of papers. I opened it, not knowing what to expect. There were photographs inside--things that are burned in my mind now that I'll never forget. They may have been black and white photos, or there may simply have been no color to begin with. And then there were the words written on the backs of the pictures.

It was those pictures--photographs of a horror I'm to young to have lived through (thank God)--that gave me an insight into who Magneto is. Why he does the things he does. The people in those pictures, they were peaceful, but look what their nonviolence got them. Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals; scholars and intellectuals; philosophers and political prisoners. Mass murder, for no other reason than because they were different. Now it's mutants, and we're the ones who are different these days. 

Is there a war coming? 

There was a picture of an enormous slab of poured concrete, crazed and scorched, in the middle of several hundred acres of bare field, as if someone had decided to build a small city but forgot to put in any buildings. 

On the back of the picture, it said, _Even where the gas chambers and ovens have been torn down, the death factories completely razed--even there, the memory of hopelessness is still so heavy, the air is nearly impossible to breathe. The ground itself is cursed._

Another picture, this time of a line of Allied soldiers coming into a camp. Bodies, the dead and dying, were piled where they had fallen. The ones who could still stand, naked and emaciated, reached out to their rescuers. The hope on their faces, the smiles that looked like death masks... 

I flipped the photo over, as much to hide the hideous picture, as to read the back. _Those few of us who survived the final death marches, we saw the gates of hell flung open, and our gentle caretakers put to flight or put to death. Those soldiers, whose compassion should have been burned away by war, became our angels--though they did not know whether to pity us or be terrified of us: we, the walking skeletons, the living dead._

My hands were shaking by the third picture. It showed a wall hung with hundreds of smaller photos of people's faces. A picture of pictures. 

__

The rest of the world had not known what was happening. Few knew in the beginning, though even when word did get out, no one cared. In Auschwitz, a group of captive Jewish scholars and rabbis, having lost all hope, gathered together one evening. They put God Himself on trial for breaking His sacred covenant, and they found Him guilty. 

"I cannot tell you all of the horrors I witnessed in that camp," a voice interrupted. 

I turned away from the folder and the horrific pictures, relieved. I recognized the man's face from news briefs I'd seen shortly after Ellis Island. 

"I saw young children lined up with their mothers and shot. I saw a man strangle his own son over a crust of bread." He rubbed his fingertips over a set of faded numbers on his forearm. His hand was trembling. "My own parents were torn from me the very day we arrived. The soldiers had promised them work--but when I saw the smoke pouring from that awful chimney, I knew I would never see them again." 

He walked over to me and took my hand in his, even though he must have known the consequences. I suddenly remembered my father, arms red and chafed almost raw, picking me up to take me to the bathroom.

"I used to think I understood your anger," I said. "I used to think I knew where you were coming from. I was wrong--I had no idea." I knew I was crying, but I didn't try to stop. "Why would people do such a thing? I mean, I can see someone being afraid of me, or of that big man Sabretooth, but... Why?" 

Why? I guess it must be a question that's been asked millions of times. 

Magneto pushed a final page into my hand. It was a newspaper clipping. 

__

The infamous geneticist, Dr. Ian Morgan, was found guilty today on two counts of illegal experimentation on mutants. His wife, Mary Elizabeth Morgan, testified against him during the trial, but was not present at the conviction. Her whereabouts, along with their daughter's, are unknown. 

The rest of the article became a blur--a nice way to say I was still crying. The funny thing is, all I could think was, _I didn't know Dad was infamous_. That, and _So what constitutes _legal_ experimentation?_

"I am so sorry, my dear," Magneto said. "Ian was a respected colleague of mine. His research was key to the operation at Ellis Island--but I had no idea that he would subject his own daughter to it."

"No!" I said, startling myself. "No. My father _loves_ me!" 

I thought about how I had been nothing more than another piece of furniture to him, until my mutation happened. _Then_ he became a father. _Then_ he loved me. My fur bristled, and my claws punched angry holes in the paper. 

Why? It's a question I have to ask now, too.

"We beg and plead and cry to heaven for meaning," Magneto murmured. "But no one ever answers. Ever. Life is brutal, and death is abrupt, and the only meaning there will ever be is what we make for ourselves. What happened to myself, what happened to you, cannot--_must not_--be allowed to happen again. And that is meaning enough for me."

I realized then that, behind the foppish clothing and the calculating eyes, Magneto was just an old man with a number tattooed on his arm. Sometimes I feel like I've got a number tattoo, just like his--except that mine's in my father's handwriting. I suppose that's meaning enough for me, too.


	20. All Good Things

****

XX. All Good Things 

Those pictures I'd seen, and what he'd said, are still stuck in my mind. There's a part of me that can't help but pity him, and the others, for what happened. Then there's another part that just recoils in horror. I don't want to think about it, but I can't help it. Some part of my mind keeps taking me back to those pictures and stories. What would I have done? 

Probably the same thing as Magneto did--lash out at the prejudicial rhetoric in Congress, the anti-mutant violence that was becoming more common and more acceptable.

And then there was that newspaper clipping. What would I do now? You can imagine my nightmares.

I suppose it was the pictures that did it. Magneto had let me in on his deepest, most personal loss. What he told me about the camps, about the killing--and about how much worse it was to survive--I don't know how to describe it, except by what he said: 

"It was the best of us who died. The rest of us--we were willing to do anything to escape death. We stole from each other, lied to each other; we did anything and everything to ensure that it was our neighbors, not ourselves, that were selected for the gas chambers and the ovens. We weren't lucky, we were craven."

Amazing that, after all this time of resenting, hating, and fearing Magneto for what he'd done to me, I'd find myself liking him. Agreeing with him. To find that what had happened to me was deliberate, when I'd thought for so long that I was just an accidental casualty. That I wasn't a daughter, I was an experiment. It's another thing we have in common: we both live with the question of why.

I had been running for so long, and it was so easy now to just forget my problems. Not only was I safe among my own kind, but it was these people--the very same ones who had now taken me in, given me a home and a purpose--that I'd been running from! Whatever mixed up decision I'd made to face them, I decided that they weren't the evil bastards everyone made them out to be. I'd have called it eerie, but it was too good. It was just so weird, to be welcomed by the very folks I'd been scared of--well, by Toad and Magneto, anyway. Sabretooth was a loner, and Mystique was just a bitch; but they let me alone, pretty much, and I kept out of their way. 

It was so good, actually, that I just couldn't get myself to ask Magneto any more about my parents. It sounds awful, and it was. I was so afraid to ask, because I was terrified that he wouldn't know. Or that he would know. Or that he'd been more than just my father's colleague. I couldn't shake the feeling that he had known what Dad was going to do to me--so I buried that feeling and forgot it.

Instead, I explored the island compound on my own. Magneto had given me the use of an empty room, and I now had the first real bedroom since I'd run away. The bed and the sheets were made of some thick material that was too tough for me to harm, so I could actually sleep normally again. Like I said, it was good. I never actively tried to pry into anyone's business, but I found everybody else's quarters, and I found a set of laboratories (which stank, so I decided not to go in), and then I found a door to the top of the island. 

It led out to a small plateau, open to the north and east, but faced by cliffs on the south and west. There was some grass there, and a few flowers, like a garden. It was nice to be able to get out in the open again. Not that I really minded the company, but I was so used to being alone. And it was nice to get away, once in a while, from the work my host had asked me to do.

Oh, yes, my work. No, I didn't help them make plans to take over the world. Or help think up new and unusual weapons of mass destruction. I typed up petitions. That's right, petitions. What, you think Magneto and his "Brotherhood of Mutants" didn't lobby just as hard as other special interest groups? I wrote to Congress, I wrote to governors. I wrote to foreign leaders--now that was fun. I even took up where Mom had left off, and wrote some articles for an underground mutant magazine. I was doing something. It was worthwhile, and it felt good.

Maybe that was part of the reason I held off asking about Mom and Dad for so long. I didn't want my newfound paradise to end. But you know what they say about all good things...

I woke up shaking in the middle of the night. A conversation was running through my head, one that had happened so long before that I'd all but forgotten it.

__

"How long had you known, Ian?" 

"Mary Elizabeth's amniocentesis. The OB-GYN asked her if she wanted an abortion."

"So why didn't she have one?"

"Jesus, Dave! You know how long it took us to get pregnant! Did I ever tell you how many miscarriages Mary Elizabeth had? You don't turn down a gift like that. No matter what. Almost everything Melody's got should have been latent. It was that radiation at the UN summit that triggered it."

"Have you spoken to Erik?"

"He's been... out of the country." 

My lips mouthed the words. _Have you spoken to Erik?_

The next morning, I went up to the little garden up top, and Toad was there, just sitting there looking out at the ocean. That's when I decided to quit playing around and ask, already.

"Before I left Rochester, you said you could take me to where my parents were. Then I came back here, and I found out that my dad's a mad scientist, and my mom is missing."

He didn't blush green. He turned just as red as any normal person. 

"So?" I said. "What gives?"

"Come on," he muttered, and motioned me to follow him back inside. By the time we got to that little office-waiting room, I had to run to keep up. He wouldn't look at me, so I knew something was wrong.

"Yes?" Magneto said when Toad opened the door.

"Um. She wants..." he stammered.

"I see," Magneto said, and waved Toad out. Amazing how communicative these people were. "Come in," he told me, "and have a seat."

I did. 

"My dear, I owe you my deepest apology." He came over and sat down next to me, and took my hand again with a tight smile. "I know what it is to lose one's family." He pursed his lips and sighed, and his hand tightened on mine. "But I, at least, have closure with mine. I cannot imagine what you must be going through, the betrayal you must feel; and therefore, I cannot hold off speaking with you about this, simply from my own discomfort, any longer.

"Your parents..." He sighed again, heavily. "I am afraid that I am responsible for your loss."


	21. In Our Own Little Ways

****

XXI. In Our Own Little Ways 

"What?" I was on my feet at this, spines erect and quivering. I felt my tail lashing against one of the chair legs. "Where's Mom? Is she okay?"

"Sit down, Melody, please." I did, but slowly. "I don't know the answers to your questions. What I do know is that I paid a visit to your parents while you were... away." 

In other words, while I was running around my family's woods like I knew what I was doing, Mom and Dad were shooting the breeze with one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted. Yeah, and when I called the cops in a panic, they tried to arrest ME for my parents' possible murder. That makes sense.

"I met your father through a mutual acquaintance some years ago. Unfortunately, I am considered a criminal by most law-enforcement agencies in this country." He still hadn't let go of my hand. Some detached part of me wondered how long it would be before his skin started to burn. "The FBI took your parents in a raid just after I left." 

Hoping to catch Magneto, they caught an innocent couple instead. The government is nothing if not efficient. 

Except that they weren't so innocent--at least, my dad wasn't. Magneto said Dad had been a colleague of his. How much had he known of Magneto's plans for Ellis Island? I'd wanted to explore at the edge of the island, and Dad had let me, hoping to bring home his own little private genetic experiment. No wonder he'd been so excited. That cheerful interest wasn't just a father's strength and reassurance for his daughter.

Paging Dr. Frankenstein.

I'm not really sure what I was feeling then. Anger, of course. Confusion. Even relief, as weird as that sounds. All that running scared, and I finally felt sure that Magneto wasn't directly responsible, after all.

There goes that instant trust again.

Always the gentleman, Magneto pulled a handkerchief from his pocket for me. I wiped my eyes and blew my nose, and he threw away the ruined little scrap of cloth that was left. It would have been funny, under almost any other circumstance. After he tossed the handkerchief, he took a little tube from the same pocket and started rubbing lotion on his hands. I guess that explained how he could touch me for so long without hurting himself, if that stuff worked against my particular biochemistry. Once again, my mind flashed back to my father's chafed skin. An invention of Dad's?

"Toad said he'd take me to where my parents were." Yes, I was whining, I admit it. And sulking, too.

"Ah, yes, Mortimer and his tongue. The boy's quite taken with you, you know." 

"Then he's crazy," I snapped.

Magneto sighed, folded his hands in his lap, and gave me a Look. Yeah, that Look--the kind that lets you know you've just put your foot in your mouth. "He is not the only one happy to be working with you. As for 'crazy'--well..." His eyes crinkled in a tiny smile. "Aren't we are all mad, in our own little ways?"

I don't know why I didn't see it right then. Like I said, it was the instant trust thing. Hey, maybe that's one of my mutations, or something, like hating other women. But no, I'm just too naive for my own good. 

"You've been a great help to us here," Magneto said, "and I wonder if you wouldn't like to help us more." I nodded like the idiot I am, and he led me to that lab I'd found, but not entered because of the smell. "It was your father, actually, who gave me this idea. Contrary to popular belief, there are not simply mutants and non-mutants. There are quite a few people carrying latent mutations. Your mutations, in fact, were latent, until the... incident... at Ellis Island." He patted my hand, smiling again. "I do hope you have forgiven me for that. It was not my intention to harm you."

"What do you mean, about my father? What idea?"

"It's quite simple. Ingenious, really--you should be proud of him." 

And _that's_ when I heard the alarm bells. 

"As it turns out," Magneto explained, "non-mutants simply cannot handle having mutations forced upon their bodies. But subjects with latent mutations are a different matter entirely." He opened a door at the end of the lab, and led me into what looked like a huge freezer.

This was where that stink was coming from--the bodies laid out on tables. I recognized several of them--they were the people that had been missing, that last time in Rochester. The scaled man was there, and the old woman, among several others; but they looked different. The man had sprouted horns and a tail, and the woman had grown blotchy. Make that more blotchy. As for the ones I didn't recognize, I half suspected they'd been pretty much normal--normal for mutants, that is--before this. 

All of a sudden, I realized what Magneto meant by latent mutations. 

I'm not even going to go into what my stomach was doing at that point, or the way I felt like I was about to faint. All I knew was, I had to grow some acting skills, and fast. So I let my discomfort show, and he, in his courteous fashion, led me back out and closed the door. 

"My problem now," he said, "is that full adults aren't able to last out the changes, any better than normal humans. I need younger subjects to test this theory on, before I take it to the fully latent population." He gave me a measuring look. "I know this must be quite disconcerting for you, Melody. Please believe me when I tell you that it is hard for me as well; but I learned a long time ago that sometimes sacrifices must be made."

I kept my emotions under the tightest control they'd ever been. I even--amazing as it sounds--managed to keep my quills from going nuts. "I understand, and my parents--or at least, my mom--would have understood." Shit, I wanted to puke so bad: I knew what 'younger subjects' he wanted to experiment on! 

"It's just been so hard, you know?" (Cue the tears.) "I thought I had great parents, but when they were gone, no one else wanted anything to do with me." (Sniffle.) "And I'm lucky--I can defend myself. God knows I've had to." I didn't have to fake the shiver. "What about those kids who can't? Who's going to look after them, if their parents don't want them anymore, or if everyone else is too scared of them?" (Sniffle again.) "Maybe more people would understand, if more of their children wound up like us." Damn. I almost convinced myself there.

I was hoping I could cajole him into letting me go with whoever was going to 'retrieve' Night and Day. Wonder of wonders: for once, the universe let me slide by. Gave me a 'Get out of jail free' card, even. All I'm waiting for now is my Oscar.

Magneto smiled at me kindly. "I'd like you to accompany Toad back to Rochester, if you would. I'm looking forward to seeing how much more powerful those twins can become."

We were to leave the next morning. That night, when I went to bed, I found a bouquet of the flowers that grew up top lying on my pillow. I sniffed them and smiled, put them in a little cup on the bedside table. Then I climbed into bed and hugged the pillow, still smiling. You know, everything a girl's supposed to do when she gets flowers. 

Inside, though, I was thinking something very different. Somewhere in that mess of my female instincts, there had to be a way to wrap that Cockney amphibian around my furry little finger. The thing is, I'm not entirely sure I wouldn't have done the same thing as Magneto. But I drew the line at children. No other kids would be experiments like me.

I have nightmares, sometimes, that I'm still back in that lab, and one of those bodies is my mother's. 


	22. A Curveball Thrown For a Loop

****

XXII. **A Curveball Thrown For a Loop**

I can climb a tree in under a minute; I can find water by the lay of the land and the vegetation; I can navigate a sewer system blindfold. 

What I can't do is act like a woman: I never learned how. Yes, my mother wrote steamy romances, and yes, I actually read one or two (and all without vomiting, too!) but even then, I knew that stuff was as fake as it gets. I'm not exactly a social animal, and the last time I had any sort of romantic interaction was when I was fourteen.

There's a big difference between a cute boy and an adult mutant. As it turned out, though, that's not exactly what I had to worry about. 

Before we boarded the helicopter, Toad presented me with a bottle of the same lotion Magneto had been using the day before, explaining that it created a seal for up to an hour between bare skin and my corrosive bodily fluids. 

Then he planted a shy little kiss on my cheek. 

The larger part of me wasn't sure whether to blush like crazy, or to sink into the stone floor right then and there. (Since sinking into stone was out of the question, I settled for blushing.) The part that was still lucid was complaining that it was the male who was supposed to be affected by the female's blandishments, damn it! Just goes to show how much I know about it.

I'm not quite sure exactly how long it took us to get back to Rochester and the old vacant field there. All I know is that Toad kept shooting me sly little looks, while I kept wanting to disappear. I couldn't believe that just the night before, I'd been wondering how to use my feminine wiles on him. Not sure I'll ever be able to live that one down.

The only thing that kept me halfway sane was the thought of Magneto getting his hands on those kids. I'd left Rochester the first time to protect Night and Day from myself. Now I was going back to try to keep them safe from Magneto. I just had to be sure to keep my head on straight. 

Feminine wiles, huh? What are those? Let me tell you, they're not just what a woman uses on a man. Oh, boy, did I ever learn better. 

It's probably a good thing that no one's likely to ever read this notebook. That helicopter ride and what happened at the end are just about the most humiliating things that have ever happened to me. Take one embarrassingly innocent seventeen-year-old; add two adolescents, the nasty sense of humor of your deity of choice, and quite possibly the trickiest mutant around. I still can't believe it.

When we landed, I was still trying to figure out how to get the kids out of there, minus Toad and the helicopter. I failed. It was just after dark, and the two were playing outside again. Night would create his little balls of light, and Day would chase after them till she managed to catch and douse them. Toad and I watched them for a few minutes before he called them over.

"Hey, kids," he said. "I know you don't much like living here. So Melody and me, we're here to take you someplace nicer."

Night moved to stand in front of his sister, and folded his arms. "What do you mean? You told us we'd be safe here."

Toad cocked his head up at me, smiling. "Well, y'see, it's kind of a surprise. Right, Mellie?"

I nodded stupidly, not knowing what else to do.

Night wasn't having any of it. The kids were just entering that stage of adolescence when the sexes start to differentiate, and adults become the common enemy. Night was broader at the shoulder than I'd remembered him, and Day had grown taller than her brother. I decided I'd better keep away from her, just in case.

Crouching a bit, Toad whispered something to Day and Night. Both of them suddenly grinned--trying their best not to look at me, but failing miserably--and ran to the waiting chopper. I gave Toad a questioning look.

"I told 'em there was a surprise waiting at the end of the ride for you, and that they'd get a kick out of it. They like you, you know."

"They do?"

" 'Course. You're a grownup who's never treated 'em badly." Wearing his cocky grin, he leaned forward and whispered, "There really is a surprise at the end, Mellie."

I had no choice but to get back on the helicopter with Toad and the kids. Before the blades started up again, while I was still buckling in, Day leaned forward and asked, "Why is your name Melody? Do you sing?"

I managed a smile for her and said, "Only if you cover your ears." 

Everyone laughed but me. My mind was reeling, trying to spit up some sort of plan to keep the kids safe, but I kept coming up blank. We were headed back for the island, where the kids--who were unlucky enough to possess still more mutations than had emerged--would be turned into Magneto's lab rats. 

Pay attention, now. This is what happens when a curveball gets thrown for a loop. 

We didn't head out to sea. Instead, the landscape started to get more and more familiar. When I saw the mansion below us, my jaw dropped.

"What are you doing?" I yelled over the headset.

Toad glanced at me. His eyes glowed gold. "Surprise," a silken voice said. "My son is a mutant. I can't let Magneto have these children." 

"But--" I said.

Mystique-Toad started the landing and said, "You really don't want to know what I bribed Toad with to let me take his place."

"But--" I repeated.

The mansion exploded like an anthill that had just been kicked over. People in black leather uniforms began running toward the helicopter, shouting. "Toad" got the kids off, explaining to them that they were going to live at this school from now on. Getting back in before anyone got close, she said to me, "Get out. Make sure they're taken care of."

"But... what about me?" Did I mention I was confused as all hell?

She shot me a smoldering look and snapped, "What about you?"

Yes, Mystique, I do want to know what you bribed Toad with. Maybe then I'd be left with something more solid than just these useless funny feelings in the pit of my stomach.


	23. A Matter of Time

****

XXIII. A Matter of Time 

I tried. I really did. I lived there at the mansion for something like a month before I ran again. And yes, I'll say it: _I ran away._ Not to protect anyone, not to make anyone else happy, not even to keep myself from being hurt. I ran because they scared the shit out of me. They still do. Sometimes I feel a mental pressure wash over me, as if there's an enormous mind making sweeps over the land, looking for me.

Yes, I know it was a school--I went ahead and popped in on a class or two--and I know they didn't want to hurt me, but still. Those people are simply frightening. They have these extraordinary powers, and they KNOW how to use them. I'm not just talking about Logan here. Believe it or not, that half-feral man was the least frightening of the whole damn bunch. He didn't try to pretend he was safe to be around. 

Everyone else there--well, they were all just a group of cute, harmless, never-hurt-a-fly mutants. Except that they could kill you just by looking at you. In at least one case, literally. 

I'm back on the run right now, and they're safe in their warm school beds, but they still have the ability to leave me completely freaked. They weren't downright horrible or evil or anything like that, but... I mean, these were people who did everything in their considerable power to be the best they could. That's why they were so frightening. 

Just thinking about them is making my hand tremble. I wonder if anyone will be able to read this, my writing's so shaky right now. Good grief, listen to me. I'm rambling again.

The kids there weren't all that bad. Except that they were so damn _intense_. Every single one of them was desperate to grow up NOW. I don't know, maybe this is the pot calling the kettle black. Then there were the adults. I'll start with the weather witch. She was the black woman with white hair who'd greeted me at the door the first time I showed up there. Yes, she was still a bitch, and no, this was not my instincts talking. She was an absolute goddess--and knew it. The most I can say is that we agreed to keep out of each others' way.

Then there was the red-haired doctor. (Yeah, I've got a thing for red hair--I used to be a redhead, after all.) I suppose she was a nice enough woman, but she was a woman, and that was enough. She kept trying to get me into her office so she could examine me--until I told her, in no uncertain terms, just exactly where she could stick her stethoscope. She was also telekinetic and telepathic. Watching something float by itself into her hands is just plain eerie.

The doctor's fiance could punch a hole in a mountain with his eyes. This guy was the poster boy for 'if looks could kill'. He was also just about the most self-controlled one of the bunch. The knowledge that he had the power he did--and kept it in perfect check--had me on edge every time I saw him. Waiting for him to slip was like waiting for a storm to break--and waiting, and waiting... The only person there who had more control than him was the professor. 

He fucking terrified me. Make that, terrifies, present tense.

Saying the professor's a telepath is like saying Magneto's got a little grudge. This is a man who could rape your mind and then make you forget it ever happened; a man who could control the country--the world, even--with a few well-placed mental leashes; a man who had more power in his little finger than Magneto could ever dream of. But he didn't use it. Every time I saw him, I wanted to either puke or run for the hills. 

Well, hell, I guess I have run for the hills, after all. 

The problem is, they want me back. The professor and the doctor--they're so damn nice. They want to _help_ everyone. They want me to go to their nice, tame little school, become a nice, tame little mutant. They want me under their control.

Fuck that.

The last person I want to mention is the girl who smiled at me from behind the weather witch the first time I was there. She had brown hair with a white streak and pretty brown eyes. It's weird, because she was so dangerous. She could steal your power and your memories--your life, even--just by touching you, skin to skin. It probably shouldn't be surprising that she dressed like a damn mummy. Maybe it's because she wasn't so in control like all the others, but I actually liked her quite a bit--when I wasn't anywhere near her. We used to drop each other notes. It was the only way we could have anything approaching a conversation.

Shortly before I finally left, the professor called me in to his office to speak to me. No, I didn't feel like the problem child getting sent to the principle; I felt like the death row inmate getting sent to the chaplain.

When I went in, he smiled at me and said, "Have a seat."

I couldn't. I literally couldn't. I can't sit down and relax when there's a dragon smiling at me. Hell, I've got a major case of the fidgets just writing this down. So I kept to my feet and tried not to think about how my quills were achingly on end, my tail lashing. I was so nervous, I think I may have spilled some venom on the floor. 

"I'd like to see what you could do in the Danger Room, Melody, with an eye toward eventually making you a part of the team." They called their training simulator the Danger Room. If they'd put me in it, someone would have gotten hurt.

"No."

"May I ask why not?" This man was so polite, so restrained. He could have made me want to take part, but he didn't. I suddenly got the impression that he was listening with more than just his ears. It gave me the chills.

"I'm not like you, professor. You keep thinking that I'm a nice girl, but if you put me in that room with another woman, I'll kill her. I am _not_ in control. I am not civilized. I am barely even human." My insides were shaking. I knew what he'd say next--the whole 'We Can Help' spiel.

"I understand your fear. After your parents' disappearance"--and no, he didn't know where Mom was, either, though he'd mentioned the possibility of protective custody--"you had no chance to develop yourself in a safe environment. This is exactly why I would like you to train with us--to learn how to control your gifts." 

Ha! This was a man who called the power to suck another person dry a 'gift'. "I don't have gifts, I have instincts." I could tell that he was still 'listening,' so I threw some of my memories at him. Don't ask me why, I have no idea.

His expression barely changed. "Let us help you," he said softly. Any minute now, I'd feel a pressure on my mind to do what he asked. Any minute now...

The pressure never came. I really don't know what scared me worse--his power, or the fact that he didn't use it. At least, not then. Now that I'm gone, it's a different story.

I guess the whole rub was that they were in the right--and they KNEW they were in the right. All this power under one roof, and they used it to defend people who needed their help. I don't mean they were like cops, or EMTs, or something like that. These were people who did what they did because it was the right thing to do. They would have died protecting people they'd never even met, and all for their principles. It's not like they got paid for it. 

Fanatics--that's the word I'm looking for. Their mission was their life, and they wanted to make me just like them. No, thank you. The only thing I pursue with such single-mindedness is my next meal.

As soon as I could, I left the office and climbed up to the roof. I wanted nothing more than a little solitude, but my friend with the streaked hair was already up there. She popped up from behind a chimney, obviously glad to see me--but she startled me so bad, I almost threw her off the roof. Instead, I threw myself over to a nearby fir tree and hid in its branches. Funny that I should want to be alone so much, after spending so much time wanting human company.

I didn't come down till the next morning, when my stomach was gnawing on my backbone. (After living on bark for months, real food has its attractions.) Logan was waiting at the bottom of the tree. He was the only one there who would bother to snap at me when I needed it, so I figured I was in for it; but all he said was, "You don't have to stay here, you know." Then he stalked off. And he was right, too: the twins were safe here, after all. 

So now I'm on the run again. The FBI have wanted me for questioning for ages now--but after my dad went to prison, and my mom got a serious case of vanishment, I'm not about to humor them. The professor and his people want me to live in their Happy Hero World. Every time I feel the latest mental sweep, I have to wonder how long it'll be before they find me. Magneto wants me back for--well, for the same reason the hero folks want me, only not tied up in the pretty package. 

There may be a war coming. But you know what? I really don't care anymore. Whatever god decided to pull this trick on me, I'm done playing along. 

I guess it's just a matter of time, now. 

__

End. 


End file.
